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.