Setting Up An Airport Network

1623 days ago in How do I?, Tutorials by Brent | 13 Comments

UPDATE: Post pictures were lost in a crash, but the large flickr pics are still available. Just click on the broken pic link to see the large version. Sorry for the inconvenience. – Brent

I don’t know about you, but I have had my Airport Extreme and Express for a while now and never really took the time to get both of them working correctly. They worked for what I needed them to do, but it was never 100% successful. With my crazy schedule, I had just let myself be okay with the flashing yellow lights on the front of both units. Well, last night I decided to “conquer the beasts” and get all set up as well as I could. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be. What I found out was that I couldn’t just let it set things up automatically. Here’s what I ended up doing. Hopefully this will help those of you out there that were in my same boat.

FYI: This is a 3 page article (to keep the scrolling to a minimum).

Let’s start by opening up the Airport Utility. As you can see by this screenshot, I have an Extreme in my home office (Hooked to a Dell 1600n Laser Printer) and an Express in the living room (hooked up to my stereo for AirTunes).

Let’s start with the Extreme since it’s the one that creates the network. To set it up completely, you will need to do a “Manual Setup”. Click the button and let’s get configuring.

Here’s my AirPort configuration pages. I have named my network “SPORE”, my base station “Office” and selected my time zone accordingly. You can set these things to whatever you choose. If you have an AirPort Express, the most important screen to pay attention to in this menu is the next screen.

The AirPort/Wireless Screen: At the top of this screen, it is important that you set the wireless mode to “Create a wireless network”. This will allow for your Extreme Base Station to be the parent of a WDS network which is what the Express needs to connect to and for you to use all of it’s features correctly. The second item to set on this screen is the security settings. Most likely, if you have not set this, your base station will be flashing a yellow light warning you that your network isn’t encrypted. You can tell your base station to ignore this and it will give you a green light, but we’ll set it just because it’s a good idea to have a secure wireless network to protect your privacy (and your bandwidth).

Note that we have selected a “WPA/WPA2 Personal” security protocol and I have put in a connection password. Be sure you remember this information for when you want to connect anything else to the network (i.e. laptop, AirPort Express, etc.).

At the bottom of this screen there’s a button that says “Wireless Options”. I have set mine like this:

Multicast Rate: This is the minimum speed in Mbits/s that the base station will allow for connections. By default, it is set at 2Mbit/s, but can be lowered to 1Mbit/s for longer range connections. If you have a lot of base stations in close proximity (like in my small neighborhood – I can see 9 networks from my living room) the density setting should be adjusted upward. Setting high multicast rate can also be a quasi-security measure.