Steve T2

Q: Connecting Two Airport Extremes

There are a number of old threads on this topic, but I thought I would publish the results of my 12 hours of troubleshooting to finally get two airport extremes up and running.

Item 1: ~2010 Airport Extreme Time Capsule 802.11n (the squat one)

Item 1: 2015 Airport Extreme 802.11ac (the tall one)

Situation: I have a large two story house and want to have one airport upstairs and one downstairs. I also have several hubs/switches in the mix.

 

Despite this article; I think that Apple has changed some things in their firmware that prevent ANYTHING coming in between the two airports. Also the article needs to be updates for the 802.11ac version.

 

I have tried every single combination of cables, lengths, types (patch or straight through) and I CANNOT get the two airport extremes to connect via "ethernet backbone" if these is a hub or switch in between. I have tried two different D-Link Gigabit switches and a generic hub inside my control box. In addition, it is a very painful exercise when you re route the wiring, you have to basically wipe out both extremes and start from scratch. Rebooting usually did not work.

 

Here is the "happy" picture of everything working correctly:

Screen Shot 2015-06-12 at 10.59.41 AM.png

 

I welcome comments from others who might have gotten it to work with hubs in between...maybe I missed something.

MacBook Air, iOS 7.1.2

Posted on Jun 12, 2015 11:00 AM

Close

Q: Connecting Two Airport Extremes

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

  • by LaPastenague,Solvedanswer

    LaPastenague LaPastenague Jun 12, 2015 2:02 PM in response to Steve T2
    Level 9 (52,541 points)
    Wireless
    Jun 12, 2015 2:02 PM in response to Steve T2

    There are tricks and tips for sure.

     

    Part of the problem is how the airport utility works.

     

    I no longer have AC apple router.. but I have plenty of the older ones..

     

    Here is what the airport utility is currently showing. The old TC I left there.. because I wanted to show how everything is now so unstable.. at the utility itself.. and how hard it is to get things to forget properly.

     

    Screen Shot 2015-06-13 at 6.49.17 AM.png

     

    I have a switch and both the TCgen4a and this one are plugged into it.

     

    Screen Shot 2015-06-13 at 6.52.31 AM.png

     

    To see this other TC I need to run a cable to it. And change over the airport utility to ethernet.

     

    Screen Shot 2015-06-13 at 6.53.55 AM.png

     

    However it is in fact working fine as part of the network.

     

    Screen Shot 2015-06-13 at 6.54.38 AM.png

     

    I really have this setup wrongly though with double NAT.

     

    So that is the first issue.. it should be in bridge.

     

    So I do that.

     

    It now appears correctly

     

    Screen Shot 2015-06-13 at 6.57.27 AM.png

     

    So in terms of wiring the TCGen4a is wired to a switch which is wired to TCUSgen3.

     

    The airport utility is still working on ethernet.

     

    If I switch back to wireless it will still work with everything refreshed but by tomorrow the TCUSgen3 will have disappeared again.

     

    This is made much worse in Yosemite by its poor DNS.

     

    However it should actually work fine.. it is just the stupid utility is having issues in the discovery.

     

    Test it yourself by pinging between them.