Running Kamikaze with WRT54G under Client Mode

Hav­ing the inter­net cable modem and the router in one place in the apart­ment, I needed a way to con­nect all my gad­gets in my room/office with­out hav­ing to run a dozen of eth­er­net cables in the hall­way. More specif­i­cally, I wanted to have my IP phone close to the bed and not to have to run a wire just for that pur­pose. The main router is an old TEW-432BRP from Trend­net and I had a also an unused WRT54G run­ning Open­wrt. Here is the setup I have at the moment and the con­fig­u­ra­tion fol­lows bellow:

Net­work Overview

Open Net­work

/etc/config/wireless

config wifi-device  wl0
        option type     broadcom
        option channel  5
        option disabled '0'

config wifi-iface
        option device   wl0
        option network  lan
        option mode   "sta"
        option ssid openNetwork
        option network "lan"

Wep Encryp­tion
/etc/config/wireless

config wifi-device  wl0
        option type     broadcom
        option channel  5
        option disabled '0'

config wifi-iface
        option device   wl0
        option network  lan
        option mode   "sta"
        option ssid wepNetwork
        option network "lan"
        option encryption wep
        option key1 'mywepkeythatyouwontguess'

My intent was at first to setup a WPA2 bridge, but I finally gave up because nei­ther nas or wpa_supplicant (xsup­pli­cant as well) did the job. nas, the pro­pri­etary tool for set­ting up the broad­com chipset, is also a night­mare to debug with its cryp­tic error mes­sages (or should I say its absence of any error mes­sage ?). The con­fig­u­ra­tion file that is shown above is pretty much self-explanatory. Using Wep 128 is a pretty good com­pro­mise on secu­rity that I would have bet­ter avoided, but I think it worth it con­sid­er­ing that MAC fil­ter­ing can be done and that I always have access to a VPN server.

An impor­tant thing that you should also not for­get finally is to dis­able the DHCP server on the Open­Wrt router because it might con­flict with the other router since we are work­ing in a bridged environment.