Linksys BEFW11S4 Router as an Access Point

Overview

A friend donated an old Linksys wireless broadband router to help a local organisation open their broadband connection to wireless. The Linksys BEFW11S4 isn't really designed to do that job, it's really designed for home networks where it would act as the primary router. What we really needed was an AP which just bridges wirless clients with the ethernet.

However, it is very rare to find a cheap home wireless router that can't be tricked into acting as an access point - you just have to configure it correctly. Here's what I did to get the BEFW11S4 to behave itself like a good little AP.

In a nutshell

All you have to do is remember that this router is no longer going to be doing any routing, all we want it to do is bridge. So the "Internet" port on the back we ignore, and instead connect the Linksys to the network using one if its LAN ports.

Boom - access point.

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