Hi guys, I'm new here, I'm trying to set up my secondary router Linksys WRT54GL with OpenWrt to connect my primary router Arris, I managed to connect my primary router and it worked fine, BUT the problem is... my wireless security cameras only require WEP to connect, not WPA2 or whatever, because these cameras are old... I couldn't figure out.

Is there a way to create virtual SSID with WEP pass from this repeater?

Here is my actual settings
imgur[dot]com/suRwhv0[dot]png

Thanks in advance.

(Last edited by joannesalfa on 28 May 2017, 22:15)

A WDS system cannot change encryption on the fly. You could try a universally bridged wireless network (i.e. a repeater without WDS) but I'm not quite sure how to set that up with OpenWRT.

The easiest solution, is to either downgrade the encryption of the Wi-Fi network to WEP, or to purchase newer cameras which support WPA2.

If this is not an option, then if your OpenWRT router has two radio devices (such as 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) available, then you can configure things so that one of the radios acts as a client in the Wi-Fi network hosted by the Arris router, while the other one hosts a new Wi-Fi SSID that uses WEP. Your cameras then connect to the latter.

To make things easy from the network perspective, you could configure the OpenWRT router so that the "client Wi-Fi" is bridged to the second Wi-Fi, and thus it "extends" the first wireless network in a sense, although in reality the network medium is switched in-between, and the wireless networks themselves have nothing in common. Both networks use same IP addresses, DHCP servers, DNS servers and so on, making network management somewhat simpler.

If your OpenWRT router has only a single radio device, then what I suggested above might also be possible, but it requires that both the WPA2-AP and the new WEP-AP to use the same wireless channel (the one radio in the OpenWRT router can tune only to a single channel at a time) and it will probably reduce the effective throughput of the wireless channel to a crawl, rendering the network unusable if your cameras generate a lot of data onto the network.

There might also be other complications getting the two APs operational on the same channel as well. I've never done something like that so I can't anticipate them or help you out if you run into problems.

Sorry for late reply, I got your useful info Antek.

I was thinking I could place secondary router to connect with primary router using ethernet cable doesn't affect extra settings for wifi, right?

Then I configure this secondary router to generate wifi signal with WEP to connect wireless cameras.... I should try it if is possible, thanks!

WEP is not secure at all.  It will be trivial for any script kiddie within wifi range to access the cameras.

If you don't care about that, you could just make another AP on the router with WEP security, and set it up like a guest network.

If you do care about security, either replace the cameras, make a wired connection, or turn off their radio and use a small router to convert ethernet to WPA at each camera.