Let me just say that for something so seemingly simple it turned out to be anything but. It took me three tries, several hours on the phone with Linksys tech support and the final configuration was not standard. This was caused mainly by a lack of understanding of what the range extender needed to work and a lack of documentation included with the boxed product. In the end the answers seemed obvious, but nothing seemed obvious during the install.

Wireless repeaters are Layer1/2 devices. They work strictly by receiving an Ethernet frame from a client computer and forwarding it to the wireless access point. This happens because the repeater has the mac address of the access point and the access point has the mac address of the repeater. Most routers have WDS (wireless distribution system) turned off by default, so you need to find where to turn that on in the software. IP addresses are used solely for web based configuration and have nothing to do with the operation of the repeater. Unfortunately in the Linksys setup program there is no provision for entering mac addresses, only IP addresses. You also can’t configure SSID in the setup program.

Both lights don’t have to be blue on the WRE54G. They may both be blue when the repeater successfully auto-configures, I was never lucky enough to find out. The repeater is working when you can reach its web based GUI while connected to the access point or vice versa. Right now my daughter is surfing the web and the top light is red, the bottom light is blue. That’s the way the lights looked when it was pulled out of the box and powered up.

If you decide to use a Linksys router or access point to connect to the WRE54G make sure you’ve upgraded to the latest firmware. My router was purchased in April and it came with firmware that wouldn’t support WDS. The Buffalo router did and the configuration pages seem much more logical to me.

WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) is not supported since WDS can’t work with dynamic keys. It’s a step back to WEP. You may want to disable all security until you get things working.

Read these two pages for detailed instructions:

WDS http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article78-page2.php

WRE54G setup http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article90.php

These are the steps that I took to get the Buffalo WBR2-G54 to work with the Linksys WRE54G. The Linksys pair just never would work together for me.

1) Log into the router and enable WDS. Set up the mac address of the repeater as a WDS partner. Click apply enough times to make it stick. Leave the page and come back to ensure that there isn’t an Apply button that you missed.

2) Reset the repeater to factory defaults.

3) Discover the repeater with a wireless enabled PC. Set the IP address of the client to 192.168.1.200, subnet mask 255.255.255.0 so that you can access the repeaters web gui.

4) Log into the repeater at 192.168.1.240 and enter the Wireless mac address and SSID of the access point. Enter an appropriate IP address and subnet mask for your lan.

5) Change the PC back to an address on your subnet (static really is quicker).

6) Connect to the router and try to view the web page of the repeater. If you can’t go through the previous steps and look for errors.

Overall everything works fine now, but an advanced interface would have been easier than the dumbed down set-up wizard. At this point running ethernet would have been quicker. Not spending the extra money for the Buffalo package was the worst move.