Wireless Repeater Settings - questions

how does a wireless repeater work?
does it assign IP addresses or does it get them from whatever access point it's repeating for?
should my computers be set manually to an IP address within the access point's range or the repeater's range? (or do they need to be the same?)
is the "gateway" always the fixed access point or is it the repeater's IP address?

Re: "(or do the IP address ranges need to be the same?)"

Yes, you need to have every thing in the same address range - otherwise you would need a router to route messages from one range to the other.

They also need to have the same subnet mask.

Make sure that, if you have two (or more) DHCP servers running that they allocate IP addresses from mutually exclusive ranges, but both within the same subnet.

-------------------------------------

P.S. try not to ask the same question twice (albeit with a slight variance) - it wastes peoples time dealing with two topics essentially dealing with one problem.