A year ago I replaced my Netgear R6700 router with a newer one that supports Wi-Fi 6e and since then it was sitting in a drawer in case I needed a backup. Then more recently I started thinking about using a Wi-Fi extender to help with signal in the spots of my apartment that have less then ideal coverage, and I started thinking about my old Netgear router to help with that.

New Firmware flashing process

First thing to check was to see if it’s firmware allows extending a Wi-Fi signal and I could not find that function. I knew from experience from using some GL.iNet travel routers that are using OpenWrt firmware that they have the extender/repeater functionality, so I searched and I found that my router is actually supported by OpenWrt. The firmware flash process was quite simple, I had to download the .bin sysupgrade image from the OpenWrt Netgear page and open my router admin interface, go to the update page and upload the .bin file and do a manual upgrade. Next thing you know the router is rebooted and you are up and running using OpenWrt. For the Wi-Fi repeater functionality I followed the OpenWrt guide for repeater using relayd which was pretty great since it has step by step instructions with screenshots at each stage to confirm you are on track. One thing to note is that this tutorial is using a relayd package named luci-proto-relay that needs to be installed to create a bridge from the main wifi network to the extender’s own network. At the end of the tutorial I had a functional repeater network that extends my main Wi-Fi network to the areas that signal was limited before.

Backup and restore process

At some point I needed to use the router again as a main access point to debug some network issues I was having so the quickest way to do it was to do a factory reset to the default OpenWrt configuration. Before that I wanted to make sure I can go back to my repeater configuration without redoing all the previous steps so I checked the backup and restore guide which very straightforward, a backup file with all my settings was generated and downloaded to my local machine. When I wanted to go back to the repeater configuration, I went to the Backup / Flash firmware page and uploaded my backup files to be restored. After the restore, when I connected again to the Netgear router I did not have internet access, but then I realised that the factory reset actually removes all installed packages, and the restore process does not actually handle installing any packages, so after installing again the relayd package all network functionality was properly working again.

Other OpenWrt goodies

Besides the repeater functionality, OpenWrt has a lot of extra functionality, anything from ad blocking, DNS servers, media serving and NAS functionality, VPN and much, much more. It’s really refreshing to see how much more you can get from your hardware than what the manufacturer provides in their default firmware, so kudos to them to enabling that for so many devices.