Can I use the Airport Express as an Access Point??
This would be great to connect my radio to the audio port and then mt Directv HR20 to the ethernet port for VOD and other funtions.
Let me know if it works this way or if the ethernet port is just for "uplinking"
The Ethernet port on the AirPort Express (AX) is active ONLY when the AX wireless joins a network using WDS. You can easily do this if your main base station is an another AX or an AirPort Extreme base station (AEBS).
Unfortunately very, very, very few non-Apple devices support Apple's WDS. So if you are using a non-Apple base station to create the wireless network you probably can't do this.
I'm going to hijack this thread. I too would like to connect an AX to my Directv HR20 and to my stereo to allow streaming from iTunes on my laptop. I know a little about networking, but probably just enough to screw things up.
Unfortunately, I don't have an Airport base station. I have a Belkin F5D7230-4 router. I know you said very few non Airport routers don't support WDS, but apparently this one does. It has a wireless bridge (WDS) section. It is enabled and I followed what it said (same channel as router, same security settings, and something about mac filtering, which I don't do). In the AX admin utility, I changed everything I could think of. I added the security, changed the channel and enabled WDS as a remote base station (I think that's what the option was - it was the second option). It needed the Airport base station's mac address, so I put in my router's mac address, is that correct?
Anyway, my laptop can connect to it, but I can't actually use the connection (i.e. can't browse websites). And when I try to set up my HR20, I get OK's for IP address (I manually changed it on the AX and HR20), subnet mask, default gateway, DNS and it says "Connected" for network, but "Not Connected" for internet. Any ideas? Is there some setting I'm setting incorrectly?
