Setting up a roaming ('extended') network: success

I've been trying to extend my house network such that I have a main router(Lan + wireless) coming into the house and my TC in another part of the house. Both running the same network name so that clients just connect to one network regardless of where they are in the house. The goal is to enhance my signal and give access to the backup disk from Time machine.

After several hours of trial and error I think I may have cracked it!

Here's an article showing what I'm trying to do: Wi-Fi base stations: Setting up and configuring a roaming network (802.11 a/b/g/n) - Apple Support

Key is that the two routers are connected via the LAN so that there should not be degradation of wireless throughput due to intercommunication overhead.

My problem was.. that when I do this - I can get wireless access but access to the backup disk disappeared. I learned a couple interesting things along the way:

* Airport Utility seems to require access to the TC through the Wireless without it being part of a wider network in order to show the base station being connected. Even After proving this works, Airport Utility shows 'Device not found' for the time capsule. However, you can open up the finder and see the base station, connect to it and send and retrieve files from it

* DHCP causes problems. It appears that when connecting the networks with the same name, the TC won't alway get a connection through the DHCP server running on my main router. Interestingly - if I setup the networks as per the link but changed the name slightly, then from my macbook I could connect to the TC network and see the TC. Then if I changes the main router wireless network name to match, I could still see the base station and connect to the backup drive (though Airport Utility would instantly start showing problems finding the base station). Also if I manually selected disconnect from the TC in finder, I could not then reconnect. That caused a problem.. thinking it was possibly a problem with DHCP (getting a network ip address allocation) I setup a static link. That turned out to Almost solve the problem - except that the default way for the mac to connect was to use a named connection that looked something like this:

afp://bills%20AirPort%20Time%20Capsule._afpovertcp._tcp.local, I found that I had to set this directly to the static ip address I had chosen so that it looked like this: afp://192.168.1.2. After doing that I found I could reconnect to the TC.. but Time Capsule could not so needed to update time capsule by reselecting the disk.

In summary here's what I did:

1) Set a static ip for the TC on the main router. I actually setup a DHCP reservation on the router which basically says 192.168.1.2 will be used for the TC (using the TPs Mac Address)

2) Temporarily Separated the wireless networks by changing the name of the main router network to be slightly different. Then connected to the TC network and opened airport utility where I could now see the base station. Used the interface to change the internet connection by turning off use of DHCP and setting the ip to 192.168.1.2. Finally, 'join' the networks again by changing the name in the main router back.

3) Open up 'connect to server' on my mac (command key + k) and set a new address: afp://192.168.1.2 Connect.. At this point you should be able to see the drive in finder.

4) setup time machine to reconnect to this drive through time machine properties.

Hopefully this helps others who might be having the same problem. No doubt there's changes to make that could make this work better. Or issues.. it would just be nice to get to the bottom of this.

Cheers,

Jon