repeater bridge with DD-WRT (Linksys WRT160Nv3)

[gallery] My Trendnet 652BRP primary router (DD-WRT) with a Linksys WRT160Nv3 (DD-WRT) as a wireless bridge did not work too well (setup here). Sometimes my laptop disconnects to the wireless network and I have to unplug/re-plug the primary router to be able to reconnect. This occurs fairly often (2x a week?). I don't know what the deal was, so I decided to swap the routers as primary and secondary. In addition, I set the Trendnet router as a repeater bridge as opposed to my previous setup. Instructions can be found here. The instructions worked well, but I struggled with a few points:

1. After swapping the primary router, I had to call Verizon to renew my IP. Otherwise, the internet will not work. Luckily their customer service is 24/7.
2. Always hit Save when setting up the secondary router and hit Apply at the very end.
3. I originally had the SSID of secondary router's virtual interface to be the same as that of the primary's SSID, but things did not work. I changed the name, but after things work, the virtual interface of the secondary router had the same SSID as the primary's. Don't know whether they should match or not, so try both.
4. Make sure you can connect to the primary router being connected to the secondary router. This means the network is set up almost correct. Internet may not work yet. I unplugged and replugged the secondary router and all is well.

As a side note, I set up the following for my primary router:

1. Static IP by Mac Address/hostname for my primary computer.
2. DynDNS.org: set this up to update IP.
3. Forward the necessary ports to the static IP.

Update 4/26/2010

Repeater bridge is too slow since you can only use half the bandwidth. Changed the Trendnet to a client bridge (wireless bridge) with these instructions.