I often travel on business to a place where my OpenWrt box can only get a signal from one end of the hotel room.  Unfortunately, it's a very bad place to have the laptop, so I figure I can either string a long ethernet cable across the room and gather it up each morning, or I can come up with a situation wherein the laptop connects to the router wirelessly, and the router acts as a client to the upstream hotspot.  Actually, I see a third possibility of traveling with two routers connected via cable- one acting as client and the other acting as server.

I'm curious if any of these new-fangled router boxes with multiple antennae can work with two wireless networks- one as client and the other as server, with firewall and routing between.

I'd feel more comfortable using routing rather than bridging if at all possible, so I don't much like the idea of WDS.

Also, I thought that I read on here that for WDS to work, the upstream router has to support it.  I know that's not going to happen in this situation.

So I see the most straightforward situation is to carry a pair of Linksys WRT54GS boxes around, with a 12" ethernet patch cord, and have one be the client to the internet hotspot and the other be the server to my laptop.  A little clunky, but workable.  I'm just wondering if there is a single box that can do the same thing.

You could use an extra wifidevice at the usbport acting as client and the build in wifi as AP.

Then, you could put the usbstick to a small sattelitedish to increase range.

Greez, alx

Get one of the openwrt compatible USB-enabled router boxen, and stick a random wifi stick in the usb port. Use the router as AP, and the usb as client.

Or find one of the ABG wrt compatible boxen with two mini pci cards, install two G cards and yeah.

--neg