Wireless Bridging

My Asus USB dongle and 64-bit Bridge Linux don't play well together.

Enter dd-wrt and the E1200-V2 Cisco/Linksys N300 wireless router.

Flash the dd-wrt firmware to it, then set it up as a wireless bridge. Note that with Personal WPA2, encryption must be set to AES.

I did alter the beginning of the bridging setup a wee bit to make things a bit easier for my LAN subnet and network:
2.1 Disable wireless. I set things up on the Windows laptop, and it would keep automatically connecting to a wireless network, which caused IP address problems when trying to connect to the default dd-wrt address.
...
6.1 Change the IP address of the dd-wrt router to match your LAN subnet. In my case, that's 192.168.100.x.
6.2 Change the IP address of the computer to match what you just did to the router: 192.168.100.9. In Windows, you may have to reboot to get things to work properly after changing the IP address.
6.3 Login to the router (now at 192.168.100.x) with the username and password you created in Step 6.

Also, in general, where the instructions say to hit Save...don't. Just hit Apply.

After Step 26, if you've done everything correctly, the computer will have internet access.

27.1 Reenable wireless on the Windows computer and reboot. You may have to reset things back to DHCP after rebooting and connecting wirelessly.

Then, move the new bridge to the computer that you want to connect to your wireless network, and plug a network cable in between the router and the computer. And now you've got N-band. It's seen as a wired connection by the computer, as the wireless connection is handled entirely by the N300 bridge.

Bought the Belkin N300 first. Neither of these support bridging out of the box. dd-wrt does not support the Belkin unit.

Asus N13

I've finally got N-band on my Asus USB-N13. Turns out the kernel drivers are really old and crappy.

1) Download the Realtek (now Mediatek) drivers for the RT8070 /RT3070 /RT3370 /RT5370 /RT5372 USB here: Mediatek

2) Extract the contents, and browse to that directory in konsole.

3) For a 32-bit system, assuming you're using a network manager, edit the file "os/linux/config.mk" and change these two lines to "y":

HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y

4)  In a terminal, run "sudo make" and "sudo make install"

5) Now blacklist the conflicting drivers:
In PCLOS, edit "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist" and add the following lines:

blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2x00usb
blacklist rt2800lib
blacklist rt2x00lib
blacklist rt2870sta

6) Reboot with N-band wireless.

Note that this device and the compiled driver do NOT work on 64-bit systems. At least not on 64-bit Arch Linux.

See this page at the Bridge Linux forum for everything I tried for 64-bit. A huge +1 to ludvick there for his assistance.

Reference page for compiling the driver: Arch forum.