The WRE54G is an 802.11g wireless repeater that has been sold by Linksys for several years. I bought a few of them, anticipating that they could be useful for boosting larger networks. These extenders have two major problems. Firstly, they only work with a few Linksys routers, so forget about using them with your Netgear or Buffalo router. The second and more serious problem is that they just don't work very well. I found that they dropped network connections many times a day, making them pretty much worthless. So the WRE54Gs went into my closet, until recently when I discovered that the brave souls in the DD-WRT community had managed to squeeze their awesome firmware onto these little beasties. To date, no one has created a step by step tutorial for converting your WRE54G over to DD-WRT. Hopefully this will allow more people to rescue their repeaters from the trash heap.
This tutorial is broken into six parts, for the sake of clarity. The parts are as follows:
- Part 1 - Preparing for the tutorial
- Part 2 - Upgrade to the latest Linksys firmware
- Part 3 - Install DD-WRT
- Part 4 - Update DD-WRT to the latest version
- Part 5 - Configuring the WRE54G to work as an extender
Its pretty important that you don't skip steps if you want your WRE54G to function properly. Only step 5 is optional.
I hope that this tutorial is useful to somebody out there. If you are feeling overly grateful, please consider donating by clicking the paypal button below.
