WiFi

Overview

This is a rudimentary page about the configuration of my Wi-Fi access point, currently an Airport Extreme base station.

Configuration

Airport Utility

To connect and configure the Airport Extreme base station you need the Airport Utility application. This application was already installed on my MacBook in a newer version than the one on the CD-ROM I got with the base station.

To connect to the base station:

1. Enable Wireless on the MacBook
2. Launch the utility application
3. Wait until it automatically connects

Note: Once you have protected the base station with a password, you may have to enter that password to perform further configuration. Airport Utility also lets you store the password in your login keyring (this actually is the default) so that you can perform reconfigurations at a later point without having to know the password. This is somewhat dangereous, I think, but if you forget the password you can always reset the base station if you have physical access to it. The default password will then be reset to a well-known value, but the base station configuration will, of course, also be lost.

DHCP / DNS configuration

Before I started configuring the base station, I updated my DHCP and DNS server configurations with information about the planned new network 192.168.2.0. For details see the ISCDHCP and BIND pages on this wiki.

Configuration overview

I will use the Airport Extreme base station as a humble bridge between LAN and WiFi. In other words, I will not use its NAT and DHCP features because I trust my Linux server to provide these services. This is important for me because I have centralized a lot of stuff (e.g. DHCP configuration) in the LDAP server of my Linux server, so that I don't have to administrate all these things in a dozen places on various systems.

The configuration

The hierarchical organization of the configuration options listed in this chapter tries to represent the different sections and tabs of the Airport Utility. The utility displays everything in German on my machine, so my translations of the terms into English may not be very accurate...

Airport configuration

Base station configuration

• Airport Extreme name = landroval
• Airport Extreme password = secret
• Get time automatically from timeserver = yes
• Time server = 192.168.2.6

Wireless

• Network name = landroval-net
• Network protection scheme = Personal WPA2
• WPA2 password = secret
• Network options
  • Country = Switzerland

Access control

• No access control

Internet configuration

Internet connection

• Get address over DHCP
• Share connection = off (Bridge mode)

All other tabs are hidden because I use the access point as bridge

Advanced configuration

Statistics

• Syslog target = 192.168.2.6
• Syslog level = 5
• SNMP = enable

Information on the base station

• Serial No = 6F93205M31U
• 2.4 GHz Airport ID = 00:26:B0:FE:04:73
• 5.0 GHz Airport ID = 00:26:B0:FE:04:74
• Ethernet MAC adress = 00:25:00:FE:F4:E3