I bought several Airport Extremes when we built our new home in 2015. The Apple overlords have gone too far in this case, and I am going to show you how it really works! Using The Airport Extreme Guest Network with a Third Party Router The Airport Extreme Guest Wireless network can be used with almost any other brand of router as your main router, as long is it supports VLANs, but Apple has gone out of there way to make sure you don’t know that. And that really sucks when you need their gear to work with other manufactures products out of necessity and Apple we’re talking about things that have been industry standards for decades! Apple loves to make their technologies proprietary and compatible with only other Apple gear. This is one of those situations where Apple really pisses me off. But I suspect that a few people might argue the other way for that as well.Is it possible to use Apple’s Airport Extreme Guest Network without using the Airport as your main router? YES. If your surfboard can do NAT, you might consider using that alternatively, but I wouldn't trust it to be as hardened as one of the apple devices. So you are right, the first router would handle DHCP/NAT and the secondary should just be a passthrough. Since the main airport would be providing routing services to the cable modem, there is no reason to have the second airport do the same thing. The difference is, on the second airport, you'd want to disable routing and use it as a wireless access point vs a wireless router. In your case, you need a device to be the front facing WAN interface. You airports would then become a downstream wireless router from there. It would be the only device receiving an IP from the cable provider and would default become the main default router. What happened before is that odds are, your "old wireless router" as acting as the router between the cable modem and your LAN. Typically speaking most cable modem providers only provide a single WAN IP per modem (there are some instances where they might give you more than one, but I'll assume this isn't the case from your description). It sounds to me like you are trying to setup the airports in front of or adjacent to your existing "old wireless router". What, if anything, is wrong with my network setup, and how do I correct it? Placing both routers in Bridge mode breaks the Internet connection via WiFi, but it doesn't make sense to me that the first router should work properly in DHCP/NAT mode since the modem is already running a DHCP server, and in my limited understanding it seems to me that this would either create conflict or at least a subnet on my network, which I don't want either. The main Airport is in DHCP and NAT mode, while the second Airport is acting as a WiFi extender so it's in Bridge mode. Connecting the wired PCs after this results in them self-assigning invalid IP addresses. If I shut everything off and then power up first the modem, then the Airports and the switch with all PCs disconnected, the main Airport Express will grab a proper IP address but will refuse to connect to the Internet even still. If I turn on the Airports after that, the main Airport Express won't be given a valid IP by the modem's DHCP server and instead ends up with a .x address. If I shut everything off and then power up first the modem, then the switch, I have Internet connections on the wired PCs. Now I cannot get anything to play nicely. I recently had my old switch go bad (it was actually an old wireless router acting as a "dumb" switch), so I replaced it with an actual 5-port Linksys switch. My setup includes a Motorola Surfboard SB6141 cable modem, an Ethernet switch, and two Airport Express routers. At my business I have set up a network to accommodate both wired and wireless connections.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |