this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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What WiFi relay system can I host at home? (lemmy.adambowl.es)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
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I live in an apartment that provides WiFi that has MAC address whitelisting with a cost per MAC address slot.

What hardware/software can I use to connect to their network and rebroadcast in a new network so that all my devices can connect but the WiFi provider only sees one MAC address connecting?

I've tried a WiFi range extender but it appears to be forwarding the MAC address of the my devices

To be clear, the ISP broadcasts its own SSIDs throughout the apartment block and I don't have access to any physical network sockets

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would recommend getting a separate client radio device for several reasons:

  • You can position it better for reception
  • Get a device with directional antenna so you can point it at the best AP
  • You won't use up 1 band of a dual-band router
  • You won't be limited in your main router firmware choice to only those that support client mode on a radio

Personally I would get a nanostation loco 5ac (non-loco is bigger and probably isnt needed) and flash openwrt on it (that will free any airmax radio from the proprietary airmax limitation), configure the 5GHz radio to client mode with the apartment wifi details, and put in the desired mac into the mac field if you need a specific mac besides the device default. Make sure the radio is set to wan zone so that forwarding works and plug the lan cable from the radio to the WAN of whatever nice router you have.

I used to carry around a nanostation with this config set to xfinity access points with a small script that would pick a random MAC from a list I gathered from wardriving client MACs that I saw authenticated with xfinity hotspots. That way if I ever needed an ethernet connection for a non-wifi device I could just power up the radio and run the script to pick a new mac until I got one that was "remembered" in someone's xfinity account.

Edit: to clarify, I think the way I set it up was to run dhcp client on the radio's uplink and then hand out IPs via dhcp server on the lan port, so I think you'd be triple natted, but since you would need to double nat anyway to get around the MAC authorization it probably isn't hurting speeds any more than it already would be.