Setting up WDS between a Linksys WRT54G and Airport Express

Last monday I bought myself an Apple Airport Express (AX), which I want to set up as a Wireless extender for my current wireless netwerk so that I can connect my KISSDVD/HD recorder (a 200 GB DP-558) to the internet and so I can access the Electronic Program Guide Kiss provides on the internet.

I can very easely set up the AX as a client to join the network, with WPA or even WPA2 security. But this disables the ethernet port on it (I don’t really understand why it disables it though, except to prevent double connections), which is exactly what I need it for.

Thursday night, after a lot of struggling I finally got it to work.

For (my) further reference, here’s how to set up a WDS netwerk between a WRT54G and an Airport Express :
– on my linksys WRT54G, I use dd-wrt 2.3 SP2
– WDS is configured with the wireless mac of the Airport Express in the Linksys and the wireless mac of the linksys (there are at least 3 macs !) in the AX.
– Lazy WDS and Loopback are off
– Using WEP : create the WEP key on your linksys, but on the mac clients you need to enter in the password box NOT THE PASSWORD BUT THE HEX KEY !! You don’t need to do this with WPA, there you can use the password, but since WDS at the moment only accepts WEP encryption…
– With the later firmwares, since at least 2005 you NO LONGER need to input the fricking $ anymore ! I wish people would update their posts, because this is now causing a lot of confusion.

Extra Links :

• dd-wrt wiki has an entry on setting up the AX
• Another blog entry on setting this up