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.

• Go to the Linksys admin page under.
• Go to Advanced routing and disable NAT.
• Enable WEP/WPA under Wireless Security.
• Under "Basic Setup" Disable the Local DHCP server.
• Set the internet type to assign an IP address manually. As we're not going to be using the Internet port, we will never actually set an address - we're not interested in the Internet side of the router at all.
• Set the local address to be valid for the network you're plugging into, but different to anything else on the net. If your network uses DHCP, just give it an address outside the DHCP range.
• Connect the Linksys from one of the LAN ports (i.e. not the Internet port) to your network. You should really use a cross-over cable for this, but these days most Ethernet gear is smart enough to work it out if you use a normal straight-through cable.

Boom - access point.

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