I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
JohnR did pop around this afternoon and help get my home Apple network set up. The mission was to drop out a tired XP computer with 2 NIC’s and have AirPort Extreme ($NZ265) plug straight into my Cable Modem, and then share it’s connection with everything else on the home network.
With a couple of reboots and disabling DHCP on the PC we had it all going within about 30 mins. Fairly straight forward. Rebooting the cable modem and the AirPort Extreme at the right time was key.
You also need to install the Airport Utility (the installation CD) on each Mac to use the USB Harddrive that is attached to the AirPort Extreme. The installation also upgrades later MacBooks to use 802.11n. My original MacBook (about a year old) did not upgrade and runs on 802.11g. My wifes white MacBook which I brought a few months ago upgraded to ‘n’ and says that it has a 130MB connection. Wow!
Next step is a USB 2.0 Hub which I’ll hang out the back and share the printer as well.
The all Apple network seems to work really, really well.
I found a few utilities along the way that got me behind the OSX UI. You can find these with a spotlight search.
- Running Terminal gives you a unix prompt. Makes you feel like a hacker! You can ping from there.
- Or even better there is a Network Utility, with lots of useful goodies like Traceroute so you can see if you’re traveling across Southern Cross to get to TradeMe.
What’s next? Well Toshiba have just released a new Portege with a Solid State NAND Disk, that has 12.5 hour battery life, so hopefully a new MacBook isn’t far away. Dream spec’s would be no hard disk but ability to drive a 30″ monitor.
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So when was the right time to reboot the cable modem and airport extreme? Just about to undertake a similar exercise. Cheers
I got one from a local Apple reseller here in Perth… strangely it seemed to have already been set up as it wasn’t set to standard defaults out of the box. After a hard reset everything works though.
Super fast.
Miki, Airport last.
We tested pinging the Cable Modem and then the Gateway. When something couldn’t be seen a reset seemed to work.
I was impressed that you could set up Airport over Airport. You didn’t need to cable to the Airport to set it up.
The logic I see for rebooting was this:
- The cable modem needs to “forget” (technical term) how it talks to the old router, so disconnect the cable modem from the old router and reboot the cable modem. This now leaves the cable modem in a state where it is ready to talk to the new router.
- The AirPorts in general don’t seem to like being reconfigured (in my experience), so factory resetting (hold down the reset pin for 5 seconds until the LED starts blinking rapidly) and starting from scratch is the way to go. Every time you configure the AirPort it reboots, so as long as you’ve disconnected the cable modem and rebooted it at some point, you should be fine.
“Running Terminal gives you a unix prompt. Makes you feel like a hacker! You can ping from there.”
That put a shit arse grin on my face. The other ones I like are nslookup and whois.
Yes, our dev guys made the same point this morning :)
nslookup? Shirley you mean “dig”
“mtr” is much better than ping/traceroute but you need to get that from macports (sudo port install mtr).