Turn Your WRT54GL Into a Wireless Gaming Adapter

This past Christmas my son received an Xbox 360 which has an Ethernet port. Since the console came with the Ethernet port, Microsoft plastered “Live” all over it. Which in turn had my son wanting to get online with his new gaming console. The only problem was that his room is not hard-wired for Ethernet.

In fact, most of the house is ran on an AirLink+ wireless access point connected to an openSUSE 10.1 box with a couple of NIC's that talk to the cable modem, a 10/100 switch and a USB printer. openSUSE provides the firewall, DHCP, NAT and the network printer. The 10/100 switch provides ports for other hard-wired devices when needed. The wireless access point also plugs into the switch.


The built-in wireless adapter of a Clevo D900T laptop, a INPROCOMM 2220, could not connect to the access point when more than sixty feet from the AP. The laptop had no problems when connecting using the AirLink+ PCMCIA adapter, so I figured it must be due to the low quality of the INPROCOMM. So I went to Best Buy in search of a wireless PCMCIA adapter that uses a Broadcom chipset. While there at Best Buy browsing the shelves for a wireless adapter, I ran across the Linksys Wireless-G Gaming Adapter. The gaming adapter operates in Infrastructure or Ad-Hock modes and was the same price as a PCMCIA wireless adapter. Sweet, the Xbox or the laptop can get on the network.

Setup of the wireless gaming adapter was very easy. It was pretty much plug-n-play. My home network does not use encryption but MAC filtering at the access point. Only the specified MAC addresses can use the access point. I just had to add the MAC address of the wireless gaming adapter into the filter table on the access point to allow for the connection.

The next night my son was complaining that he could not get online anymore. After some troubleshooting I found that the power connector was intermittently making a connection. Time for another trip to Best Buy to exchange the gaming adapter. By the way, the Xbox wireless adapter sells for $100, while these gaming adapters can be had for $50. Best Buy informed us that they had no more gaming adapters available and would not be restocking the item as it has been discontinued. Disappointment was setting in. After we got back home I noticed the WRT54GL sitting on a shelf doing nothing. Hmmm...let me do some googling.

Soon I was greeted with web pages of client-bridging howto's, product reviews and so forth. I went to the OpenWRT website and found a very terse howto on setting up a client-bridge using the whiterussian firmware release. It required all sorts of CLI (command line interface) commands to setup. After reading the howto several times and browsing the forums I decided to upgrade my whiterussian firmware from RC5 to 0.9 in hopes that the gui had been upgraded too. Just FYI, the 0.9 release is supposedly the last release of whiterussian. The developers have moved over to a new trunk called kamikaze.

This image shows the wireless configuration page for X-Wrt, the gui configuration tool included in OpenWrt.  Click for higher resolution image.

While browsing in the OpenWrt gui I noticed that under the Network->Wireless tab there was a “Mode” field. There were several options to choose from: Access Point, Client, Client (Bridge) and Ad-Hoc. Things were starting to look promising. I decided that I would attempt to use the gui instead of the CLI to setup the WRT54GL into a client-bridge.

The gui is actually developed separately from OpenWrt. The official name for the GUI is X-Wrt Web Interface or simply “webif”.  According to the X-Wrt website, “X-Wrt is a set of packages and patches to enhance the end user experience of OpenWrt.  It is NOT a fork of OpenWrt.  We work in conjunction with the OpenWrt developers to extend OpenWrt.”

Diagram showing wireless to wired Ethernet bridging. Click image for higher resolution

Its is possible to configure the WRT54GL into a client-bridge using mostly webif. However, one will still needs to telnet or ssh into their router to disable some services. When in client-bridge mode you will probably want to get DHCP leases from your server or ISP. By default, the router will try to handle DHCP requests. This can be remedied by disabling the S60dnsmasq service. I just removed the execute attribute by using chmod -x. I also disabled the WAN or Internet port because it kept requesting a DHCP lease every two seconds. Disabling the Internet port can be accomplished by using webif. I also disabled the firewall too, since I'm already behind a firewall. This service is named S35firewall. For reference, the client-bridge term is also known as Infrastructure – Wireless Ethernet Bridging (WET).

These are the steps to configure the WRT54GL into client-bridge mode (Encryption disabled):

• Disable the WAN port:
  Network->Wan->Connection Type = None

• Configure the wireless:
  Network->Wireless->Mode = Client (Bridge)
  Network->Wireless->ESSID = ESSID of the access point to connect

• Configure the advanced wireless:
  Network->Advanced Wireless->Settings->Automatic WDS = Disabled
  (You do not want others on your wireless router, i.e., you only want to relay packets from the hard-wired ports )

• Disable services: ssh or telnet into router –
  chmod -x /etc/init.d/S35firewall
  chmod -x /etc/init.d/S60dnsmasq

In using webif I avoid using the CLI, so reverting back to a wireless router is simpler. Since I would probably forget how to undo what I had just done if using the CLI.  With open source firmware such as OpenWRT, you can completely reconfigure the WRT54GL vlan's, bridges and wireless modes.  The CLI is very powerful and one could really fine tune the WRT54GL configuration, but in the end, the steps mentioned previously are probably the most hassle free.