Using D-Link DAP-1320 Wireless Range Extender with MAC Filtering

Recently I've purchased a wireless range extender as the one shown here. It had troubles connecting to the upstream Wi-Fi router because it used MAC filtering instead of password security. Luckily there was a forum thread which helped me figure it out.

DAP 1320 uses two MAC addresses

Everything was working just fine with MAC filtering disabled on the upstream router but failed miserably when enabled. I thought the MAC address provided on the DAP 1320 packaging was wrong.

It turned out the device had 2 addresses. The one on the packaging is 70:62:B8:07:0B:76 and it didn't matter if that is enabled or disabled in the router settings. The second MAC is used when trying to forward connections through the router. Both addresses differ by the second symbol with a difference of 2. So I've enabled 72:62:B8:07:0B:76 in the router settings and everything worked like a charm.

Other findings

Unfortunately if a device is connected to the wifi extender's network it will bypass the MAC filtering employed on the upstream wifi router. As much as I dislike using passwords for Wi-Fi I had to configure one for the extended network.

I've also found that when you save the configuration file from the device on your hard drive it comes in a base64-encoded-line-by-line format. Pretty awkward.

Another pleasant (but not entirely surprising) finding was that D-Link included a written acknowledgment of using open source components and an offer to provide source code upon request.