Well it took me, what? Six months? something like that anyway. I finally got a config working that's linked up all the units in my apt building to share an internet connection. Here's some things I found out along the process:

Linksys' firmware does not support WDS very well. A WAP54G will function well as a repeater to another WAP54G or a WRT54G, but a second WAP54G will not function properly when it's a repeater pointed at another repeater.

Sveasoft's Talisman firmware (as of the time of this writing) was still too buggy to run reliably. It locked up the router and required a hard-reset about once a day. If that once a day happened while I was at work, I was stuck without my resources at home until I could get home and power-cycle it. That also meant that anyone who was trying to use the internet connection was out of luck, too.

Sveasoft's Freya firmware for the WAP54G causes a lot of WAp54s to just die during upgrade. Fortunately, I was able to rescue mine and bring it back to life. Their forums are very convoluted. Lots of questions, and no answers, and lots of questions with stale answers. Every now and then I'd find a question similar to what I was looking for, and the only reference was to “search on these terms, there's tons of topics about it already” but really there aren't.

There's no way to tell that you're actually using the Freya firmware, other than noticing that the firmware revision number is LESS than what it was when you took it out of the box, and there's an extra option under advanced settings that allows telnet access. There's no mention of WDS within the web config pages or the help files at all. I assume that when you put it into repeater mode, that's WDS, and went with that. Sveasoft has been talking about a Talisman Micro edition for the WAP54, and to “just wait for that to come out” but those messages saying “soon come” go back as far as January of 2004, and continue to this day.

Linksys' WRE54G is a piece of shit. The WRT54G is their wireless/wired router and is rock-solid. The WAP54G is an AP-only version of the WRT54G and runs a stripped-down version of the WRT's firmware on less memory. The WRE54G is a stripped down version of the WAP54G with one little antenna and no ethernet port. The theory of it works well, but in practice, it's dinky little antenna was not powerful enough to replace another WAP54 (which has dual antennas and an ethernet port for configuring/AP client mode). It's also more expensive than even a WRT54G is.

Linksys' support in India is hit-and-miss. The first time through the guy really had no clue about networking or even the products he was supposed to be supporting. He asked me to plug in the WRE54G via it's wired port and configure it that way, when that POS doesnt HAVE a wired port. When I said that, suddenly there was technical difficulties and the chat session was dropped. The second time through, last Friday night, I chatted with another tech for over an hour. She was the one who told me that pointing a repeater at another repeater was not supported and had me power-cycle everything at the end, breaking my connection and disconnecting me from the chat session. She said she was going to send me a different (older probably) firmware to try, but that never appeared, just the transcript of the chat session.

In the end, I had to buy another WRT54G. I “upgraded” both WRT54s to Sveasoft's Alchemy firmware and set them up as with a WDS link. I then configured the one WAP54 as a repeater to the far side of the WDS link, and it works. The two WRTs have their radio power turned up to 84mw (from 28mw) and the WRT in my apt has replacement high-gain antennas on it as well. It all works now, finally.

I'll get around to an updated Visio drawing and post it up later on.