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airport extreme as wireless access point

Hello,
I hope I have my terminology correct. I have a linksys wrt610n providing wireless through 2 floors of my house, but half doesn't see wireless very good. Moving it is out of the question. I have ethernet ran to several places in my house and I have plugged my airport extreme dualband into one of those points to hopefully provide a greater wireless signal through my house. I have named both bands the same as the original 2 bands. I have been having issues with my or my wife's laptop connecting to the airport extreme and not being able to access anything off of the original linksys wireless router. I believed that this may have been correctly set up, but now, it probably isn't. I had the belief that when I walked around in my house, when the signal was weak from the original router, it would switch over to the other router and it would have been an extension of the original router. Is there some settings that I need to change? I believe I disabled DHCP and it should have worked, but maybe I missed something. This should be connected LAN to LAN, right?

dell xps410, Windows XP

Posted on Feb 11, 2011 8:08 PM

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Posted on Feb 11, 2011 8:30 PM

Hello madduxman. Welcome to the Apple Discussions!

The most important setting would be to configure the 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBSn) as a bridge: AirPort Utility > Select the AEBSn > Manual Setup > Internet > Internet Connection > Connection Sharing = Off (Bridge Mode)

In this configuration, you can connect an Ethernet cable (coming from the Linksys) to either the WAN or LAN ports on the AEBSn ... but for consistency I would recommend the WAN (circle-of-dots) port.
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Feb 11, 2011 8:30 PM in response to madduxman

Hello madduxman. Welcome to the Apple Discussions!

The most important setting would be to configure the 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBSn) as a bridge: AirPort Utility > Select the AEBSn > Manual Setup > Internet > Internet Connection > Connection Sharing = Off (Bridge Mode)

In this configuration, you can connect an Ethernet cable (coming from the Linksys) to either the WAN or LAN ports on the AEBSn ... but for consistency I would recommend the WAN (circle-of-dots) port.

Feb 11, 2011 8:42 PM in response to Tesserax

I have the settings set to bridge mode, but connected to LAN. It should be hooked into the port that has the circle of dots? I wasn't sure which to connect to, but I knew I didn't want to start assigning new addresses, but I also didn't want it to have a completely different address that would be separate from my network that I have created. So, this should work? The problem was that my wife kept having issues with our wireless printer and her computer would never communicate with it. It is located right next to the airport extreme and it always sees that wireless point and says the signal is excellent. Well, my wife's computer says the printer isn't there, but her computer is connected to the original router and the printer to the airport extreme. Do I need to change the names of the bands on either access point or should things be good after I change the port?
Thanks...

Feb 11, 2011 9:18 PM in response to madduxman

With both routers as configured, you will basically have what is termed as a "roaming" network. This should allow you to literally walk a laptop from one room to another and still be on the "same" network.

Let's go over a few settings to make sure that this network is configured properly:

o The two routers must be interconnected by Ethernet. Again, for consistency, connect the Ethernet cable coming from the Linksys to the WAN port of the AEBSn.
o The upstream router (the one connected to the Internet - This would be the Linksys) should be configured to provide both NAT & DHCP services.
o The downstream router (the AEBSn) should be configured as a bridge. (Note: As a bridge, the AEBSn's NAT & DHCP services would be disabled. Any wired or wireless client, connected to the AEBSn, would get these services from the upstream router.)
o Since both routers are simultaneous dual-band routers, you want to make sure that all four radios (two on each router) are all using the same Network Name (or SSID)
o All four wireless networks should use the same Wireless Encryption type and password.
o On the 2.4 GHz band, be sure that the radio channels are set at least 5-6 channels apart. So, for example, the Linksys should be set to use channel 1, and the AEBSn should be set for either 6 or 11.
o On the 5 GHz band, use different channels for each router.
o Use different names for each router.

Now a few things to consider:

o If you will be attaching either a USB printer or HDD to the AEBSn for sharing, you will want to configure the AEBSn to use a static Private IP address, and not a dynamic IP address assigned by the Linksys' DHCP server. Otherwise, when the address changes periodically, you will "lose" either of these devices and clients would need to know the new address to access them. To do this for the AEBSn, you would use the AirPort Utility: AirPort Utility > Select the AEBSn > Manual Setup > Internet > TCP/IP > Configure IPv4 = Manually. (Note: Use an IP address just outside of the range of the Linksys' DHCP server pool. For example, if the Linksys is doling out addresses in the 192.168.1.2 thru 192.168.1.50 range, set the AEBSn's IP address to 192.168.1.51 or higher.)

o Wireless clients will attempt to connect to the router with the strongest signal. If these clients can support both bands, then most likely, they will try to connect to the 5 GHz signal only when near either router or the 2.4 GHz signal when farther away.

airport extreme as wireless access point

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