I have an MT300N-V2 (R1) hooked up via Ethernet to the LAN my ISP’s router/modem, and I connect to it through Wifi. In another room I have another MT300N-V2 (R2) that I want to use as a Wifi and Ethernet repeater for the other MT300N-V2. WHen I set up WDS from R2 to R1, R2 still has its own Wifi SSID that I can connect to, which is different from that of R1.
My understanding is that when WDS is set that both devices will have the same SSID. It even says in the GL-Inet UI, “When you use Access Point/Extender/WDS mode, you may not connect to this UI again. You can Press and hold the reset button for 4 seconds to revert back to router mode.” Yet I am able to still connect to the unique SSID of R2 and connect to the UI with R2’s IP address.
I tried connecting to R1 without WDS enabled on R2. I then pinged my default gateway and did an arp -a to check the MAC address of the gateway. Then I re-enabled WDS on R2 and connected to the same SSID while my computer was right next to R2, so I would expect it to pick up Wifi from the closest router (R2), but when I again pinged my gateway and checked my arp cache the MAC address was still the same. Am I supposed to manually set the WIFI SSID on R2 to match that of R1 when I use WDS?
So these things make me think WDS is not working, even though I have factory reset my routers a couple of times. I tried this all with Repeater mode instead of WDS but got the same result. How can I verify that WDS is enabled and working? I definitely works if I plug via Ethernet into R2, but of course that’s not what I’m trying to do.