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Slingbox Setup with Wireless Ethernet Bridge

Chief Oddball Tech

From time to time, I’ll post something here that’s primarily a note to myself. You might wonder why I don’t simply write this down in a document and store it on my computer someplace. In addition to my hope that these notes may offer some value to others as well, the reason is largely organizational. After all, as I back up stuff, move files around and archive things, eventually I can’t remember where I put that one file across all of the various terabytes of storage. But in the case of notes I’ve left for myself on this site, I can always find them in an instant.

So last night I was wrapping up work for the day at around 10:00 and decided that I should plug the Slingbox back in, after not having used it for a while. Actually, it was Apple who had suggested it to me earlier in the day, since we’re going to be on vacation this weekend and it might be fun to use the Slingbox while traveling. Because the Slingbox SOLO doesn’t have built-in wireless, and because it’s situated at the opposite end of the house from my main router, I needed to hook up a second router in bridge mode. Unfortunately, the network setup confounded me for some time, as I seemed unable to remember how to properly set up my second wireless router. I finally figured out what I was doing wrong, so here I’ll describe the setup that worked for me.

First of all, my primary router is a Linksys WRT54GL version 1.1, running Tomato firmware 1.25. The secondary router is an older WRT54G version 2, running HyperWRT Thibor 15c, which I put into bridge mode so the Slingbox could be plugged into it and still have access to my wireless network. With that established, here are the steps:

Primary Router

  1. Set up Static DHCP so the secondary router always gets the same IP address. I assigned it 192.168.1.149, which is the last assignable IP in my DHCP range.
  2. Forward the Slingbox port (5001 by default) to the secondary router’s internal address (192.168.1.149 in my case).

Secondary Router

  1. Change the router’s mode to Wireless Ethernet Bridge.
  2. Configure the wireless settings to match those on the primary router (SSID, security type, password, etc.)
  3. Change the Internet access mode to “Static IP.”
  4. For the router’s Internet IP, enter the same IP you assigned it in your primary router. (Again, in my case that was 192.168.1.149.)
  5. Enter your primary router’s address in the Gateway field — mine is 192.168.1.1.
  6. Enter a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
  7. For the router’s internal address, I think I entered 192.168.1.2. I don’t think this is too important.
  8. Disable the DHCP server. A device that you plug into the secondary router will be assigned an IP by the primary router.

That should get it working. Strangely, when I was Googling around for help on setting this up, I found a huge load of articles that all seemed to describe a different way of getting this to work, and none of them gave me the right advice. In the end, amusingly, it was an article in Sling Media’s own knowledge base that gave me the clue I needed — I should have gone there to begin with.