Airport Extreme (3.4.2) inactivity timer

[William H. Magill]

I've just replaced my Graphite Base Station with an dual-Ethernet 
Airport Extreme.

The two units perform RADICALLY differently.

The first annoying thing I discovered is that the AEBS has a signal 
roughly 10db weaker than the Graphite Base station. (As viewed by 
Macstumbler with the two base stations sitting side by side.)

The second thing I have discovered is that the AEBS constantly drops my 
wireless connections.

Turning on logging and using another Mac which is connected to the AEBS 
via LAN, not wireless, I find that the logs are littered with messages 
of the form:

          Disassociated with station 00:30:65:xx:xx:xx (inactivity).

What this implies that the AEBS, unlike the Graphite has some kind of 
inactivity timer associated with wireless connections.

While this might be fine for stateless connections such as http and the 
like, stateful connections, like ssh, "hang." Needless to say, so far I 
have not managed to find any documentation on this issue, let alone 
ways to modify it.

One question: Does anyone know of an OS X SNMP tool that will query the 
AEBS?


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
magill at mcgillsociety.org
magill at acm.org
magill at mac.com