networking - How to make DD-WRT router's (configured like a repeater) devices be accessible on LAN? (i.e. integrate DHCP for both routers)

I have a D-Link DIR-600-A1 router running DD-WRT (using the 601's firmware: except for the model number, they are near identical). It has an Atheros chip, so there is no "repeater" option. You can bypass this by setting the main radio as a client to the main router, and adding a virtual radio configured as an AP. You can then set up the credentials for connecting to the main router and allowing devices to connect to the repeater/router.

I have a few devices on my network:

• Ethernet computers
• Server with Samba running
• WiFi devices connected to the main router

I then wanted to add a repeater. I have a couple of other things on the repeater:

• WiFi Computer
• Other WiFi devices.

Anyway, I wanted to connect my WiFi computer to the share on my server via Samba. However, for some reason, my router treats the main router as WAN, not another device.

I've tried disabling the SPI firewall:

However, that doesn't work. I've tried pinging my WiFi computer from my server. However, I can ping my server from my WiFi computer. AFAIK, they are on the same subset, just using different IPs: the main one uses 192.168.0.x and the repeater uses 192.168.1.x (starting at 100 for some reason).

It seems as I need to configure my router(s) to work together for DHCP. I noticed there was a "DHCP forwarder" option, but I have no idea what that would do. A quick note: for some reason (that's beyond me) my ISP disabled the capability to bridge a WiFi to ethernet connection with the router they provide (something about PPPoE or similar...). The service rep I talked to when I was having issues after I changed ISPs said that, but they couldn't explain exactly what they were "blocking."

How can I get DD-WRT to not treat the client connection as WAN and the router to recognize the devices connected to the repeater?

It sounds like you have DD-WRT connecting in Client mode, which treats the LAN network as LAN and the wifi network as a kind of WAN port.

If you change this to Client Bridge mode, then the wifi and LAN ports are bridged together - which means that any packet arriving on the DD-WRT will be forwarded out of the wifi connection instead of routed. This puts all of the devices behind both routers on the same layer 2 network.

In addition, you have two layer 3 networks running. 192.168.1.x and 192.168.0.x. There must be a DHCP server running on the dd-wrt device for this to happen, which you should disable.

Because the devices on dd-wrt are on the same network as your other router once you switch to client bridge mode, they will get DHCP from the other router.