Hawking H2WR54G and Netgear WGR614v9 Bridge Mode
 

Hi

I have been racking my brains trying to get bridge mode to work between a Hawking H2WR54G (master?) and a Netgear WGR614v9 (repeater?).

The Hawking is a dual-wan router (I have Cable and ADSL) which works fine for wifi, load balancing, etc. The Netgear is going to be in a different room connected to 2 servers, so I want to set up bridge mode between the two routers (Netgear to also be a repeater?). Both routers have the latest firmware.


This is my proposal:

Server 1------|Netgear Router|>> <<|Hawking Router|-----|WAN1/WAN2|
Server 2------|


I have done the following configurations (I've obscured the MAC addresses in this example):

Hawking:
IP: 192.168.2.1
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
DHCP: Enabled
DHCP Range: 192.168.2.100-200
MAC: 00:11:22:33:44:57
ESSID: jjb
Channel: 5
Security: WPA-shared key
Mode: AP Bridge-WDS
WDS-Security: None (for testing)
MAC Address 1: 00:22:3F:32:CE:xx

Netgear:
IP: 192.168.1.1
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
DHCP: Disabled
MAC: 00:22:3F:32:CE:xx
SSID: jjb
Channel: 5
Repeater Function: Enabled
Repeater IP Address: 192.168.2.2
Base Station MAC: 00:11:22:33:44:xx


I have tried other configuration options such as point-to-point mode (not WDS) but the same problem occurs. After applying the settings on the Netgear router, the PC disconnects and does not find a connection on the wired lan (as if I've unplugged the cable!).


I haven't used bridge mode before, so could this mean that it's (the Netgear) not finding the base station (the Hawking)?


I would be very grateful if somebody can point me in the right direction.


Thanks in advance,
Jas

Re: Hawking H2WR54G and Netgear WGR614v9 Bridge Mode
 

Thanks to anyone who was going to reply. I've managed to sort it out.

It would appear that the MAC address I was using for the Base Station (Hawking Router) was incorrect. The correct MAC address for the wireless was nowhere to be found in the configuration pages, but led me to believe the 'LAN' MAC address was the correct one.

For completeness, I found the correct MAC address by the following steps:

1. From a laptop, connected wifi to base station access point.
2. Open terminal (Linux)
3. Run iwconfig

This gave me the correct MAC address for the access point.

Jas

Re: Hawking H2WR54G and Netgear WGR614v9 Bridge Mode
 

Heh, nice find and congratulations on figuring it out yourself. I wasn't aware repeaters needed the AP MAC specified so wouldn't have spotted it anyway. That said, you can find the wireless MAC of a router quite easily in windows as well, with either the netsh command or using a wireless scanner app.

Re: Hawking H2WR54G and Netgear WGR614v9 Bridge Mode
 

Thanks qasdfdsaq for the tip.

I only use Linux at home (Windows at work), but this may come in handy if I ever need to set this up for somebody who uses Windows.

The Netgear WGR614v9 (which is a Cable Router) I've got does require the MAC address (don't know whether this is standard?), you also need to specify the repeater MAC address in the Base Station configuration (on the Hawking H2WR54G Dual WAN Router).

The Netgear one is very helpful, where it will tell you the MAC address for Wifi, but the Hawking one is useless for this sort of thing - it's not very informative! Being a few years old now and quite unpopular (I only paid a few quid on eBay for it), it does work but you need to be quite clued up just to do a basic configuration.

Hopefully this information may be useful to somebody else who's looking for the same answers as me!

Thanks again.
Jas