I have been working on an interesting project that, while mostly successful, has a few glitches I was hoping ya’all could help me with.
The Project:
I was hired by a campground to build a campus-wide staff network but with the potential of maybe someday allowing campers to connect for a fee. However, after I bought the antennas and worked out the relay points, the projected costs of the kind of access points the camp would need to accomplish this gave them cold feet and they restricted me to an utterly oppressive budget. I considered leaving the antennas at their doorstep and walking away but thought better of it and did what I could to make it work as just a staff only network.
The Setup:
I dug through my bone yard of forgotten routers and got a couple Netgear WG602 v3 ‘s and a Linksys WRT54GS (don’t remember version). I flashed all three with DD-WRT and set up a WDS configuration (I was absurdly lucky all had Broadcom chipsets) with one Netgear as the host and the other two as clients.
AP1<>Host<>AP2
The Glitch:
As I am sure you can imagine, using modded hardware and a network config that isn’t even an IEEE standard, it has…. Personality. So, here is the issue. Often, when connecting a new device it will connect to the network with no issues. It will even have full LAN access across the network allowing me to ping every router but I get no internet connection from the host. Now this is an intermittent issue. Some devices do fine, others do not. Sometimes cycling power to the nearest router will fix the issue, sometimes it doesn’t. Devices that have had internet access in the past now don’t. Some that didn’t now do.
More Details:
Now, settings wise, I followed DD-WRT’s wiki for WDS setups from here:
*Whoops Can't Post URL's yet. Ok, if you go to the DD-WRT wiki and search for WDS, you'll find their suggested config settings that I used*
The network uses a single SSID and a WPA2 + AES password. Another thing I noticed is that, on apple devices where internet doesn’t work, iMessage over WiFi does. I have seen this happen before at an airport in Amsterdam while I was debating if I wanted to pay the absurd price for WiFi when to my delight, I discovered iMessage worked regardless. Maybe it’s related, maybe not. I don’t know. Most of the devices connecting are iOS devices but as of now there is also a Driod phone experiencing this problem too. There is a desktop computer that, so far, as experienced none of this strangeness.
Conclusions:
I have several theories as to what could be causing this but they are inconclusive. Things that worked once rarely seem to work twice. It must be a conflict of some kind... but I am not sure of what exactly. Any thoughts from the community?
P.S. Could it be possible that devices are being assigned duplicate IP's? I will try setting a static IP for one of the devices not connecting next. Thanks in advance!
A 'unique' personality. (WDS network config) 
Linear Mode
