My parents recently swapped Internet providers and since they didn’t know that it would take a week for the application to be completed, they were out of Internet service for about a week. The neighbors graciously allowed them to use theirs, but the signal didn’t reach the entire house. To make it reach, we configured the router to rebroadcast their wifi. If you’re going to be doing this, please make sure you get permission first!
The easiest way to do this is to just get one of those wifi extenders. We just didn’t happen to have any at the time. Since the router was Tomato compatible, I first flashed the router with tomato. The screenshots you’re seeing are Tomato by Shibby, just with a custom skin.
To do this, you first need to find out what IP address range you can use. I did this just by connecting a laptop to their wifi. Turned out that the IP address their DHCP server gave me was 192.168.7.x. I tried to ping 192.168.7.253 to make sure it wasn’t taken and sure enough, it wasn’t. I assigned 192.168.7.253 to my router.
Next, I needed to disable DHCP. You don’t want your DHCP competing with the neighbor’s. Lastly, use the default gateway that you get from their DHCP server. In my case, it was 192.168.7.1. You can use the DNS server from them also or you can use others. I like Quad9’s 9.9.9.9 or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 or Google’s 8.8.8.8.
After that, you can match up your wifi settings with theirs’ so that it can connect. Use the exact same SSID, shared key, and use “Wireless Ethernet Bridge” for the Wireless Network Mode.
Lastly, optionally, you can put up any your own wifi settings as virtual wifi settings so that you don’t need to reconfigure any of your own devices.
The virtual setting is the wl0.1. Just add it and that’s it!
That’s all you need to do to make your own Tomato Wireless Extender. This has much better range than a regular wifi extender and was available at the time.