Subject: Re: (Revisiting) Using airport- doesn't anyone know?
From: William K. Gibson (firstdesk@columbus.rr.com)
Date: Tue Jun 26 2001 - 08:11:35 MDT
on 6/25/01 3:45 PM, Brice D Ruth at brice@webprojkt.com wrote:
I'm not entirely clear on what your network setup is like - your cable modem
receives an IP address from your cable provider via DHCP, right? So you
have the AirPort 'Internet' tab setup to use DHCP - then the 'Network' tab
is setup to not give out addresses, right? So in doing so, you have NAT
setup, so that your base station is 10.0.1.1 and your Powerbook is 10.0.1.x,
right? Clear me up on this, just to make sure there's nothing funky going
on there.
Correct:
I have checked "Distribute IP Addresses"
Radio "Share Single IP Addresss (Using DHCP & NAT)"
Checked "Ethernet Client computers also share a single IP address (using
NAT)"
Checked "Enable Airport to ethernet bridging"
As for the encryption - I haven't had any success using WEP on my network
unless I'm running exclusively MacOS. Don't *really* know why, I've read
all the docs, input the WEP keys manually - I even got my laptop to the
point that the WEP authentication worked, it was able to get an IP address
from the AirPort base station, but then nothing really worked. Explain
that! Very screwy - I create a closed network now (webprojkt) which I hope
nobody in my apt. building will figure out :)
I have no problem using WEP with linux boxes. But perhaps this is the issue
with the slowdown? You get the network equivalent password from the
BaseStation menu of the AirPort Admin Utility and then use that number to
configure your interface. I set up the name of the airport device and the
password (enc) in a init.d script called "airport"- like this:
iwconfig eth1 essid "myairportname" enc "XXXXXXXXXX"
where the XXX... represents the hexidecimal number given by the Base
station.
My current AirPort setup is actually pretty simple - I have a firewall that
is hooked up to the cable modem via static IP which gives out IP addresses
on 10.0.0.x via its second interface. The AirPort is setup to simply bridge
- basically do nothing.
Yeah - the arp stuff isn't necessary. I only did the first time, thereafter
(when I rebooted my iMac) I forgot to do it & things still worked.
Here is an interesting thing that may be a clue. When I set the
.../tap0/proxy_arp to 1, my MOL machine complains that another hardware
device is using my IP address. My tap0 interface is set to 10.0.1.x and my
Mac IP address is set to 10.0.1.y, but the Mac complains that the tap0
hardware address has already comandeared 10.0.1.y. So, to actually use the
tap0 interface I have to set ../tap0/proxy_arp to zero. Sooo, maybe this is
some kind of indicator of how my setup is screwy on the Linux side?
I'll try to see if email is somehow handled differently - I use Mozilla
0.9.1 and on occasion, Netscape 4.77 for email, so if your culprit is an M$
product, I can't be of help there. But, that would be seriously strange.
You know, some websites are slow too. I don't think it's Express. Really
Brice, I super appreciate you helping in this way. But if its too much
trouble (and it looks like its getting that way for you) then don't worry
about it. I'll try a few things with my BaseStation itself. I think this may
be the issue- like maybe WEP or some port forwarding stuff I have set. But
heck, it could be anything, from my kernel configs to the TiBook itself.
Again, its really great to have your input and you have given me some ideas
to work with, but don't feel obligated to keep going with it.
Oh - about the 5.5M - that's what I have my AirPort set to. I set it to 11M
as well, measured the actual speed and got nowhere close to it, so I dropped
it down - the higher the speed setting, the lower the range, so I traded
signal strength for speed.
Wow, I didn't know that. Interesting.
--William K. Gibson
1stDesk Systems
firstdesk@columbus.rr.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue Jun 26 2001 - 07:16:55 MDT