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Airport Express WDS with third party NAT / DHCP
As it happens I was wrestling with this problem a couple of weeks
ago, with a twist. Broadband comes into my house via DSL to a
wireless base station (2Wire) , i.e. NOT an Apple. It runs DHCP through the air and to all devices hanging off an ethernet hub to which it is cabled.
Lessons learned after hours of experiments: There is no easy way to get the Airport Express to extend the 2Wire network. I have an Airport Extreme base station. I jacked it into the hub, and noted the DHCP address the 2Wire gave it. I know from experience that these addresses are highly stable once assigned. I configured the Extreme base station to treat its own IP address as static, and to run NAT and DHCP, in the same 172.16/16 space as the 2Wire manages. Clients on the Extreme's network can't reach the outside Internet, but I can (and did) configure the Express to use the Extreme as a WDS base, and the Extreme to serve as a WDS base (that allows wireless clients, and names the Express as a remote WDS base). This established the WDS link between Extreme and Express, and I then reconfigured the Extreme (under "Network" in Airport Admin Utility) to (i) Distribute IP addresses, (ii) sharing a fixed range of IP addresses that again overlapped the 2Wire network's space. So the trick is that remote devices (at least the Apple laptops in the house) can get an IP address from the 2Wire network when they are in range of it. Switching over to the Extreme's network they retain the IP address, and can surf the Web. The ethernet hub bridges IP traffic between the 2Wire and Extreme networks, e.g. I can scp between devices on the two networks. So I'm not entirely sure of all the nuances involved in making this go, but here's the settings on my Extreme when the lights came on and the Express actually extended the network
"Airport" The Express was configured to extend an Extreme, using 128 bit WEP for security. It does seem to have gotten its IP address from the Extreme base station. So if I were to get broadband via a cable modem, my guess is that this basic schtick might work if the remote devices have IP addresses configured manually, in the address space managed by the cable modem's DHCP server. Naively running a connection through two NATs appears to be problematic and so we can't run NAT through the Extreme, but that's what the Express assistant wants to see to configure WDS. That's the only time it checks though. IP addresses are remembered mostly once assigned, and so if you can get a client a legit (from the point of view of the cable modem's IP space) address, the modem isn't going to be picky about where that address came from. Just my $0.05 worth, YMMV. |
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