All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

New Wireless Access Point

davorg on 2003-09-24T06:29:59

So the old Apple Airport basestation is gone. It was just too unreliable and kept overheating and cutting out. It's been replaced by a new one from Netgear.

The Powerbook (of course) just worked first time with the new basestation, as did the two Linux machines. It was a different story with the Windows (actually Win98SE) machine tho'. And an hour or so of fiddling last night didn't seem to fix it.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that the new basestation doesn't contain a DHCP server like the Airport did. The Windows machine seemed happy enough to get DHCP info from the basestation but is too lazy to look any further for it. Even tho' there's another DHCP server on the network (in the ADSL router).

So last night I played with giving it a fixed IP address and DNS servers. I managed to get it pinging the ADSL router, but no further. Looks like I'll be spending a large part of this morning deep in the world of Windows support web sites.

Did I mention that I hate Windows?

DHCP and routing

drhyde on 2003-09-24T07:52:25

DHCP is meant to propagate from one network to another, but that functionality is not always implemented and needs to be turned on on the router. If the router doesn't support DHCP relay, you may be able to configure it to be a bridge instead of a router.

As for your problems with seeing the rest of the world, remember that clients should have their default route set to their nearest router - in this case the base station - which should in turn have *its* default route set to your DSL router, which in turn has its default route set to your ISP. All of that may or may not happen automagically via RIP or OSPF. If in doubt, configure static routes and disable funky routing protocols.

You should look at

hfb on 2003-09-24T08:04:37

the SBASE page if you haven't already. I had an old one that died that Apple replaced only because I saw this guys page which noted the serial numbers of the defective basestations as well as how to repair it if they hadn't.