Turning a Router into a repeater

[InnocentBystander]

Little problem my friends are having at our new apartment. There are two rooms, and more importantly a refrigerator between our modem/router and my friend's bedroom (and computer). He basically can't get any signal in his room, and the working theory is at the gigantic old metal electrical refrigeration device has something to do with it. I'm bringing a new router over when I move in this weekend, and I had the bright idea to turn their old (and in my opinion somewhat flaky) router into a repeater, put it in the kitchen next to his bedroom, and try to get him signal in his room without resorting to more drastic measures, like running cable or buying expensive equipment.

Question is, how do we turn the old router into a repeater? I figured that setting up the connection settings to use the new router as a gateway would work, but I've never had the opportunity to test this, and I'd like to know if anyone has any experience in this area before I go in blindly trying shit, and wasting my precious few hours off before school starts.

[phongn]

The right way: learn routing tables and manually set the route on the old router to send packets to your new one.

The easy way: point the old router to use your new one as its gateway, essentially have a double-layer NAT.

[Pu-239]

Huh? I thought most routers can't act as both an AP and a client at the same time? Unless he's running cables from one router to another.

If it's a WRT54G, you could use OpenWRT to make it a repeater (dunno about the other custom firmwares).