Well, so I returned back for using OpenWrt equipment devices which had already been a part of my humble Homelab for many years. The idea we're going to discuss here in this tutorial is how to convert your OpenWrt router to a Wi-Fi signal receiver.
The benefit of such a setup is acquiring an internet connection for your OpenWrt client devices that are connected to the router, they simply get to access the Wi-Fi network we're connecting that router device into.
Okay, start by navigating from your browser to your OpenWrt "Luci" web control panel which happens to be on address 192.168.1.1 by default.
Connect to a Wireless Network in Client Mode
You should find the option to do so right the from the Menu above Network > Wireless so please note that you could either go with 2.4 GHz or 5GHz bands. I would recommend to use 2.4 GHz since it tends to be more stable from a long distance.
Once you have decided, click on Scan to search for networks, find your target wireless network and click on Join Network correspondingly, refer to the example from the image below.
Alright, just make sure to set "Name of the new network" to wwan then assign the firewall zone to wan and save it. Now, finalize your configuration from the main page click on the Save & Apply blue button down there.
Configure OpenWrt Firewall to Allow Forwarding
Here we go the final magical step, navigate to Network > Firewall from the menu above to access the firewall "General Settings" and make sure it looks like this.
What is important is having "Foward" set to accept and similarly click on Edit the blue button from "Zones" to configure the "lan" firewall zone like below.
Additionally, it's also very important to make sure that both "Masquerading" and "MSS clamping" options are ticked on the "lan" firewall zone settings.
By now, I suppose all clients that are connected to your OpenWrt router device can access the said network, and thus able to access the internet. It really doesn't matter whether you have your client devices connected to OpenWrt by a wired ethernet connection or wireless.
