I have a computer and a 360 in my room with no wireless network adapters so I figured I would buy a wireless router to connect it to the other wireless router that has the modem on it on the other side of the house. All my semi-geeky friends say "Oh yeah you can do that. You just have to make sure the SSID and channel are the same on both" WRONG! I cannot get my new $30 router to connect to the other one!

I did a little more research and found out that there are such things as wireless bridges which are a lot more expensive.

Is there any way on this planet I can turn this $30 non-refundable wireless router into a bridge?

The internet-sharing router is a Linksys WRT54G and the new one is a TrendNet TEW-432brp.

You could do that no problem with OpenWrt, but I don't know if it supports that device.

Check out http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware and find something that you can get cheap to replace the TrendNet device.

Or you could swap them, use the TrendNet as the host, and the WRT54G as the bridged client.

I dont think the WRT54G can be a bridge... and what McFly suggested is WAY too confusing.

What I was saying is that the WRT54G can be used as a bridge with OpenWrt. The TrendNet most likely can not with OpenWrt (as it doesn't support the device).

This is called "WDS" (Wireless Distribution System") and it allows multiple routers/access points to talk to each other.

Typically, high-end wireless routers are best for this, but like McFly mentioned, some cheap routers can be flashed with 3rd party software which gives you additional features, including WDS. OpenWrt and dd-wrt are two such 3rd party BIOS packages.

I just got myself an ASUS WL-520gU router today and it has WDS built-in. I was actually surprised since the feature wasn't mentioned on their site.

Actually the trendnet is on the list of supported hardware. I just don't know where to get the actual firmware. I would prefer to use the trendnet as the bridge because the WRT is currently the most important piece of my network and I don't want to risk messing it up.

Actually your 432brp has the status of "untested." With 1MB of flash memory, that's a pretty tight space for Linux. The downloads are at http://downloads.openwrt.org, you can ask around on the forums if it will work. It may be running VXworks. DD-WRT micro (which, unless you're comfortable mucking around in Linux, would be the recommendation anyway) may be able to handle it if OpenWrt can't.

I DID IT! YAY!
It is rare for something to work 100% for me!

I made the trendnet router my primary and installed DD-WRT on the Linksys and set it up as a wireless bridge! It works perfectly!

Thanks for the help guys!

Awesome, glad you got it working.