I found a cheap router at Fry’s that claims to be able to act as a wireless bridge, access point and repeater. Cool; I bought it and brought it home.
Only problem is the firmware is absolute garbage. I had a hell of a time configuring the repeater mode because the repeater would never authenticate with my router.
This device does not like to play nice with a WPA-PSK/TKIP setup. In fact I don’t think it likes TKIP at all. When I switched to AES it authenticated just fine, although I had to configure the router in AP mode before switching to repeater mode (it wasn’t saving my settings when configured as a straight-up repeater). The firmware is so godawful that you have to toggle between the different modes just to be able to access all the menus you need to configure it.
Problems resulted from this though; I had problems authenticating using AES with both Windows 7 and Ubuntu.
So ultimately I switched my network to a WPA2-PSK setup using Auto encryption. My router will now serve whatever encryption method client devices support at the time of connection– the Asus device can request AES and everything else can go with TKIP as normal.
Any luck with DD-WRT on this device?
Surprised I didn't mention it. I tossed DD-WRT on the device; the firmware worked but I couldn't get it working in Bridge mode or whatever their equivalent is. At this point I don't remember what kind of encryption I was trying to use though so that could have been the reason it wasn't working.
had the same problem for months. use this firmware instead:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Asus_RT-N12
here's the instructions:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Repeater_Bridge
the asus rt-n12 repeater is an absolute bargain when you use this firmware.