[P1] Wireless help request

[kollar at alltel.net]

> I have recently purchased a wireless access point (not a router)

There's your first clue -- it's not a router. :-)

> to go with my new airport card.  I plugged the access point into my router, 
> fired up the airport and voila I was surfing wireless.
> 
> ... The manual says the default IP address of the 
> access point is 192.168.1.100, but the router's internal address is 
> 192.168.123.xxx, and thus computers connecting to this router are given 
> IP addresses in this range.  Therefore the access point cannot have the 
> default address, but so far I have been unable to discover the IP 
> address of it.

That's because it's, in network terms, a "switch" or a
"bridge" (the only difference is that a switch attempts
to deliver only packets going to machines on the other
side, while a bridge simply copies everything from one
side to the other). Since they operate at the link-
layer, or MAC (Media Access Control, not Mac) level,
basically Ethernet addresses, they don't even *need* an
IP address to do what they're supposed to do. However,
most of them have an IP address so you can manage (i.e.
configure or monitor) them.

> Is there some way I can sniff out 
> the access point's IP address?

It's most likely 192.168.1.100, just like the manual
says. Have you tried pinging that address from the
wireless side? You *might* have to manually give a laptop
an IP address like 192.168.1.88 to talk to it. You could
then run a port scan on it to see what it has available --
for example, if port 80 is open, you can talk to it with a
web browser.

I wouldn't worry about it though, if it's doing its job.
Switches are rather boring critters, when it comes right
down to it, unless you have a bunch of them talking to
each other in a network.

Heh... I knew that spending last week in a switching &
routing class would come in handy. :-)

Pedantically yours,

    Larry