At home, I have had a setup with a wireless router for quite a while. It’s more or less a stock OpenWRT setup, but I have split the joined all the wired ports into one virtual interface (actually, I think they’re just on one VLAN) and split off the wireless. The wireless is open to the world, but I have a fair amount of packet filters there so it doesn’t get too annoying. Some people have no shame and run bittorrent and other file sharing utilities on other people’s open wireless.
Anyway, my setup is no longer so simple. I bought a WRT54GL to provide
better reception in other parts of the flat and wanted to join those
two. After a little bit of reading, I found what I wanted: WDS.
Due to a previous misconfiguration of the WRT54GS, the WDS
connection was joined onto the br0/LAN segment and not the wireless
segment. That was easily enough fixed, but it’s always a bit scary to
change network settings on headless devices. (I did manage to lock
myself out, but I could ssh through in from the wireless network, so I
just used the WRT54GL to bounce through.) Once that bit was up, I could
set up WDS, I did as the documentation told me and did it with
lazywds (anyone can do WDS with you) enabled. It worked, so I
turned it off and rebooted both routers (again..), and it still worked.
Yay!