I just bought a WNR2000v5 and it appears to already run OpenWRT. "KAMIKAZE (bleeding edge, r18571)"

I saw a thread about enabling client bridging on one. It seemed rather involved - bad magic numbers and all that.

Must the image being run be rebuilt or can I just add interface ... wifi0 to br0 or br1 ( br0 appears to have the proper IP address )?

root@WNR2000v5:/# brctl show
bridge name     bridge id               STP enabled     interfaces
br0             8000.10da431f4ff9       no              ath0
                                                        eth1.1
                                                        pas0
br1             8000.10da431f4ffa       no              eth0
                                                        eth1.2
root@WNR2000v5:/#
root@WNR2000v5:/#

Is ath0 the radio interface?

I'd really like to use these ( and perhaps the N150 series ) to replace a handful of older clients around the house.

Sorry, don't understand, what you want.

br0 - bridge corresponding to LAN, br1 - bridge corresponding to WAN. It seems, that ath0 - wireless interface.

I would like to configure a WINR2000v5 as a client bridge.

So, as far as I have understood, you just want to make router connect to existing WiFi network and expand it to clients directly, i.e. it just creates bridge to wireless network without NAT. It is explained in the manual, dedicated to "bridged client".

These router do not run openwrt. They run vendor stock firmware they derived from openwrt. But its highly modified. From my experience it sucks. I had too much problems with it. From very slow wifi until reboot to hanging in kernel mode processes I couldnt kill

That;'s correct. Each node is either the AP or an element of a layer 2 bridge over wifi. My understanding is that each client node is called a "client bridge".

Thank you - that is very valuable information. I can't tell from the website - is there a plan to bring up the WNR2000v5 under OpenWRT?

Yes, the WNR2000v5 is working great with LEDE (OpenWrt is not beeing developed any more).

More information about the WNR2000v5 support you can find here:

https://github.com/lede-project/source/pull/1256

LEDE and OpenWrt are going to merge under the OpenWrt name.