Airport connection problem

Question

Level 1

58 points

Airport connection problem

I live in a three story townhouse. I have an older Time Capsule on the first floor that is connected to my AT&T router. I have two Airport Extremes on the second floor and one on the third. They are all ethernet wired to the system and configured to extend the same network. One of he AEs (the newest one) is in a cabinet located 3 feet from my laptop. For some reason my laptop gets a very weak signal (transmit rate = 5; MCS = 0) and the AE information shows that it is connected to the Time Capsule on the first floor and not the AE three feet away. iStumbler shows that all four devises are operational and have signal strengths I would expect given my location in the house (the one three feet away is the strongest). How do I coax the laptop into connecting with the strongest signal instead of the weakest?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on May 22, 2012 5:56 AM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

158,484 points

May 22, 2012 8:41 AM in response to baddabing

If you temporarily move the AirPort Extreme that is closest to the MBP outside of the cabinet that it is in, does this improve the "chance" that the MBP connects to it now?

Also, do you have your routers configured for a roaming network or an extended network?

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Answer 2

baddabing Author

Level 1

58 points

May 24, 2012 6:14 AM in response to Tesserax

Thanks for the advise. I am configured for roaming. I followed the link and I think the problem is that the "primary" base station was set to bridge mode instead of Share a Public IP Address. When I switch to share a public IP address on the router directly connected to the modem and go to update it won't let me do it because "The DHCP address you have entered conflicts with the WAN IP address of your Apple Wi-Fi base station." I have the beginning DHCP address set at 192.168.1.2 and the ending DHCP address set at 192.168.1.254. It looks like the WAN IP address is 192.168.1.2 so I tried to reset the beginning DHCP address to 192.168.1.3 but that didn't work. I think I'm close but no cigar.

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Answer 3

Tesserax

Level 10

158,484 points

May 24, 2012 8:16 AM in response to baddabing

The "key" is that the primary Internet router (the router directly connected to the Internet modem) must be configured to provide NAT & DHCP services; all other routers in the roaming network must be configured as bridges (NAT & DHCP, both disabled)

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