Westell 7500 as wireless bridge for DirecTV HR21

[RichSPK1]

I was connecting to the internet through a Verizon-provided Westell 7500 router.  My DirecTV HR21 DVR has no wireless access, and it's too far from the router to run cable.

I thought I'd buy a new router and re-purpose the Westell 7500 as a wireless bridge for the HR21.

I went out and bought a Belkin N750 DB and have no trouble connecting to the internet from my computers through that.  I'm trying to set up the Westell as a bridge by connecting it to a Mac with CAT5 cable.  I set it up as a Routed Bridge, shut off the DHCP server, and re-enabled wifi, but I can't connect to the internet (nor the new router admin pages) through it.  I have the Belkin router set up as 192.168.1.1 and the Westell getting it's IP address from DHCP, but I also tried setting it up as static 192.168.1.2.  Neither worked.

Is anyone successfully using a Westell 7500 as a wireless bridge for a DVR?  What am I doing wrong?  How have you set it up?

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Thanks!

Rich

[smith6612]

The Westell 7500 doesn't support WDS as far as the Verizon firmware goes, so this is not possible to do with the Westell set up in a bridge-like configuration. See if your Belkin supports WDS. Failing that, you should consider using MoCa networking if there is Coaxial cabling in both rooms (modem and DirecTV Receiver), running the Ethernet cable (it's good for some 300 feet of cabling) or consider Powerline networking, or finding a dedicated Wireless to Ethernet bridge. A PC will act as one if you wish to plug it into a PC when you wish to use networking on the Receiver.

Now, if you are using the Mac as the source of Internet Connectivity, the Routed Bridge setting is irrevelent since that is only if the 7500 is holding a WAN connection. You need to ensure the Mac is configured to share it's Internet connection, perhaps via a network bridge, before the Westell can be used as an Ethernet bridge through the Mac. I'm not the most familiar with how Macs implement those features as compared to UNIX-based systems, but Google for the Mac equivalent of Internet Connection Sharing on Windows.