Connect Wifi Extender via VLAN

Roger McCarrick · ‎10-17-2022

I have wired the rooms in my house with ethernet, everything coming back to a patch panel in the basement and into a 3560 Cisco switch. I have an Asus wifi router running DDWRT version r50274, it runs DHCP for VLAN 107, LAN port patched into Gi06 on the 3560. I have another smaller Asus router in bridge or extender mode on the other side of the house. I want to connect the extender WAP to the main WAP with ethernet by bringing the cables from the LAN port on each device into VLAN 107 on the switch. When I patch the cable of each WAP into the switch separately, the link light goes green, as expected. When I have them both plugged into the switch, both switchports being in access mode, vlan 107, the link light for the extender WAP goes orange (I have tried other ports, same thing, I settled on Gi0/20). That port is fine because when I plug my laptop into that port, I get a VLAN 107 IP address by DHCP, and get out to the internet, the link light is green, all seems ok.

on the switch int vlan107 is 10.10.107.245, Main WAP is 10.10.107.250 (/24), extender is 10.10.107.249 with .250 as gateway.

WAN port on the main WAP connects to internet gateway.

When the link light is orange, I can still ping the extender from the switch and the main WAP. But no wireless clients are connecting to the extender. I can pull the cables out of the switch and join them together with a RJ45 coupler, effectively patching the extender directly into the main wap, and then I can see the clients on the extender web interface.

The extender wap is 100mbs, I have set the port both to auto and 100/full. Below I pasted some configs snippets showing the vlan, interfaces and status.

So is it possible to do this, or do I have to actually have the LAN ports on each device directly connected to each other?

ExtWAP --------VLAN107------MainWAP or ExtWAP ------------------MainWAP

sh vlan

107 USERS active Gi0/6, Gi0/20, Gi0/21, Gi0/22, Gi0/23, Gi0/24

sh int status

Gi0/6 connected 107 a-full a-1000 10/100/1000BaseTX

Gi0/20 connected 107 full 100 10/100/1000BaseTX

interface Vlan107
ip address 10.10.107.245 255.255.255.0

interface GigabitEthernet0/6
switchport access vlan 107
switchport mode access

interface GigabitEthernet0/20
switchport access vlan 107
switchport mode access
speed 100
duplex full

pieterh · ‎10-18-2022

LED's being green or orange will come from being 1Gbps or 100Mbps port
clients not connecting to the extender has a different cause than de port-speed
be aware when setting speed/duplex manually may also disable auto MDI/MDI-X -> you must change from straight cable to cross

-> remove these lines from port Gi0/20 (configure for speed/duplex auto negotiate)
speed 100
duplex full

after this returns to normal green LED you can tackle the extender problem

Roger McCarrick · ‎10-20-2022

As I said, I already tried the port without the speed/duplex setting. And I'm not sure that orange means 100mbs. It's perfectly green when the 100mbs device is plugged in alone. It only turns orange after I plug the main WAP into a port in the same VLAN.