ok i just went through the frustration of spending a good 5 hours to configure my wireless repeater while coming across this timely thread, not sure if my experience will help but i'll just share it anyway to vent
mine's also TL-WA901ND, in essence i made the mistake of first choosing repeater mode instead of universal repeater, and subsequently turning to dynamic IP for the repeater which i think is irrelevant, and then did not set the wireless security setting up for the repeater to be the same as the router's, thinking they're separate
in the end i got it to work after the following settings:
- changing the static IP of the repeater to the same subnet as the router's, and make sure it's within the DHCP range of the router's
- not sure if it matters but put in the router's IP address in the repeater's settings
- chose universal repeater mode
- keyed the router's WPA key into the repeater's settings
- connect to the router's SSID
and voila, it works now
i think the first step you have to do is make sure the repeater is connected to the router by doing the diagnostic under system tools in the repeater and ping the router from the repeater, if it times out then something above is wrong
Wireless Problems how to setup TP-LINK Access Point, as repeater?