How To Turn an Old Wi Fi Router Into an Access Point

hi guys and welcome to my tutorial on turning an old wi-fi route into an access point this method is particularly good at fixing wi-fi dead zones in your house or office and provided you have enough lan ports on the ap you can use it as a switch as well as long as the access point is connected to the same local area network as your main network you'll still be able to use iot and printers and network connected devices to achieve this we'll be configuring your old wi-fi router as an access point and connecting it to your main router via an ethernet cable if you want to learn how to crimp and make your own ethernet cables as well as what the different categories are i'll make a separate video on that and i'll upload it soon and link it to this video so to get started we first need to find out what your main router's local ip range is to do this make sure you are connected to the router via wi-fi or an ethernet cable on windows just open up command prompt and type in ipconfig and press enter if you're connecting to the router via an ethernet cable look for where it says ethernet adapter and whatever it says under your default gateway should be your router's address if you're using wi-fi to connect to the router look for the same thing only this time you'll find it on a wireless lan adapter the more nixon adapters you have the more stuff will show up here so if you've got like six different things showing here don't be surprised it just means you have a bunch of adapters on whatever device you're using i don't own a mac but to find the gateway address you click on the apple icon in the left hand corner of the screen go to system preferences select network click advanced and then click on the tcip tab your router's gateway should appear next to where it says router i'll link a tutorial in the description below for anyone that needs that now that we know the local ip range that we on we can start the configuration on the access point if you're using an old router the first thing i always do is factory restore it this defaults the device and will reset any configurations that it once had different manufacturers have different methods to do this and i recommend using the user manual or googling a model number and looking up a guide on this tender n 300 of mine i just need to hold down the reset button for approximately 10 seconds there should be a sticker on the back of the router like you see here but if not again just refer to the user manual or google a guide most vendors do follow standard practice but there might still be slight differences across the board so just bear that in mind to connect your access point either plug in the lan cable or connect to its wifi open a web browser and type in the default management ip for me it's 192.168.0.1 this process does differ depending on the vendor but here i'm just going to log in and use the default username and password in this case that would be admin and admin most newer routers will try to get you to go through a first time setup wizard which essentially exists to create a wan connection to your isp if you can get out of this with a cancel button great if not just run through the setup wizard into some burgers information it doesn't really matter just take note if it gets you to set up wi-fi names and passwords or change the admin username or password make sure that you remember what those are if you forget those you're going to need to factory reset your device again once you're on the router's main configuration menu you're going to want to look for a section that says lan on this tender router it can be found under advanced i'm going to make the lan ip address 192.168.0.255 and the subnet mask 255 255.255.0 once you hit save your router will probably reboot and your connection will be dropped you may need to unplug and replug in your lan cable or reconnect the wi-fi to get a new dhcp lease aka reconnect to the router i quickly want to mention that it is best practice to put your statically assigned devices on an ip address that is outside your dhcp pool for those of you that don't know the dhcp server usually exists with inside your main router and allocates ip addresses to devices and hosts on your network as new devices connect and send dhcp requests to it the server responds with an ip address to allocate based on a pool of ip addresses on our access point we will be setting a static address of 192.168.0.254 on the local range so we won't be using dhcp because we don't need an ip address allocated we want to make sure that we aren't using an ip address that exists on the dhcp pool in order to check this you can log into your main router and check to see what pool your dhcp is using on my router you can see that i have the dhcp pool configured to allocate ib addresses from and between 192.168.0.100 to 192.168.0.150. so if we set my access point to 192.168.0.51 we would technically be outside of the dhcp pool most access points that you can buy come pre-configured to be at the very end of the local ip range for example 192.168.0.254. not going to get into it in this video but just keep in mind that if two hosts on your local network have the same ip address you will have an ip conflict and one or both of those devices will stop being able to communicate on the network if you're unsure what ip address to use or cannot access your main router i recommend using a range close to the end bearing in mind that your local address will most likely have 254 available ip addresses on it whilst we're on the topic of dhcp we also need to make sure that we disable the dhcp server on the access point any new devices that connect to the network through the access point will have their dhcp request sent to the main router and not to the access point to do this look for the tab that says dhcp on my tender router it's under advanced and then dhcp make sure that you disable the server and then hit save now that we have the lan ip set and the dhcp server disabled on our access point it's time to connect it to the network to do this simply plug in an ethernet cable into the lan port of the access point and plug it into the other end of the lan port on your router you should now be connected to the main network and if it's internet enabled you should be getting an internet connection there are two more steps that we want to do before we call it a day though and those are number one we want to make sure that the admin password is not left on a default settings as this is a security risk to your network to change this just log back into your access point using the ip address that you set it to and find the tab that lets you change the admin password refer to your user manuals on this as the interface is going to be different depending on what route to model you're using on this router it's under the tab that says tools and then change password just make sure that you're not changing the password of your wireless step 2 talking of wireless it's time to configure the wi-fi on my access point i'll make the ssid and password the same as the main router but if you want to have two separate ssids aka two different wi-fi names you can just change it to anything you like most of the other settings you can leave default and everything should be okay i'm not going to go into any of the details on what this stuff does as it's beyond the scope of this tutorial but in the future i'll make one explaining all of them and i'll link it somewhere in this video once all of that is done your access point should be up and running unfortunately networks are often quite complicated to understand for beginners and your configurations at home might be different to mine so if you have any issues just let me know down in the comments below and i'll try to help you troubleshoot to conclude this video in bite-sized chunks one factory reset your old wi-fi router two put it on its own ip range three disable dhcp set up your wi-fi settings and you should be golden i hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it useful and if you did please don't forget to subscribe to my channel as i'll be making a lot more helpful content in the future

Channel: Tech ZA

Views: 3,394

Keywords: AP, Wi-Fi, tutorial, Access Point, repeater, wireless, ethernet, networking, IT

Id: QVmFTjJOvHg

Length: 7min 5sec (425 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021