[X-Unix] Restart Airport Base-Station

[William H. Magill]

On 13 Aug, 2004, at 07:13, peter boardman wrote:
> Is there a UNIX command to resart an Airport Extreme Base Station? 
> There’s no AppleScript support that I can
> see, and I keep having to restart the base station to get an internet 
> connection back.

None that I am aware of ... I've taken to leaving AMU running all the 
time lately. The problem is most annoying.

However, there IS a problem with the AEBS and loosing Internet 
connections.  I have an outstanding case which has finally been 
forwarded to Engineering about the problem.

There are two conditions which exist, apparently from the most recent 
AEBS update. But since before that I was using a Graphite with no 
problems, it's hard to tell. It might be a problem which has always 
existed with the AEBS, i.e. a feature not a bug, like the fact that the 
AEBS has a 10db  output signal level than the Graphite.  (Measured with 
the two units side by side.)

1- The AEBS looses, apparently, Internet connectivity, on a periodic 
basic. Where the period appears to be between 12 and 36 hours.

In reality, it appears to be loosing DNS capabilities, ARP information 
or something similar, NOT the ability to pass packets between 802.11 
and the WAN port.

In my configuration, I have a DSL modem connected to a 3Com hub which 
has an Alpha and a Beige G3 Mac connected to it along with the AEBS. 
There are then 3 systems which connect to the AEBS via 802.11.

Since I have static IP addresses for the Alpha and the G3 Mac, they 
never have any problems, and never loose connectivity, completely 
exonerating the DSL connection as such. I used to have a static IP 
address for my old Graphite, but when I upgraded recently to the AEBS, 
my ISP switched me from a REAL static IP address, to a DHCP-mapped 
"static" IP address. Consequently the AEBS is using DHCP instead of 
manual configuration. [This implies completely different code paths 
active within the AEBS as compared to the Graphite.]

I have the AEBS configured to log (via syslog) to the ethernet 
connected G3 Mac. It is also configured to set time via a 
geographically close Stratum 1 timeserver.  The AEBS never looses the 
ability to talk to the Syslog host, and I assume, because I have an 
appropriate /etc/host table entry, I can connect from my wirelessly 
connected iMac to that syslog host 90+% of the time.  It's easy to tell 
that the AEBS has lost the ability to talk to the Internet because it 
will start logging  the fact that it can't reach the timeserver to the 
syslog host. [I have verified that I am apparently NOT loosing syslog 
entries by comparing the contents of syslog with the SNMP retrieved 
logfile on the AEBS -- via Apple's AMU.

The DHCP lease is configured for 7 days by my ISP (DCAnet) and they 
show nothing exciting in their logs concerning the connection to the 
AEBS. The Alpha and the G3 never loose connectivity.

2- The second thing which the AEBS does is to "timeout" wireless 
sessions. There IS an "inactivity timer" (of unknown duration) in the 
AEBS software. These timeouts are logged by the AEBS...
"dissassociated with station <MACaddr> (inactivity)" followed one tenth 
of a second later by an entry "reassociated with station <MACaddr>"

This behavior is particularly nasty if one happens to use ssh, and goes 
off to do something else for a bit (like look up stuff on the web)... 
The inactivity timeout causes the established 802.11/ssh session to 
simply die. (Not unexpected behavior on the part of ssh.) One nasty 
aspect of the problem is that the ssh session on the destination host 
does not "go away," but hangs around until it is cleared off the host. 
In the absence of a "keep-alive" query FROM the host, the connection 
simply sits there waiting for input from the client. Again expected 
behavior from ssh.


For what it is worth, I assume that one can restart the AEBS via SNMP, 
however, I have not yet discovered the "trick."

Note that net-snmp is included in 10.3 and can be used to query the 
AEBS directly from the command line.

 From the wireless side:

snmpbulkwalk -Os -v2c -c <AEBS password> 10.0.1.1 system
                                                   if
etc.
The AEBS mib itself:

snmpwalk -On -v2c -c <AEBS password> 10.0.1.1 1.3.6.1.4.1.63.501.3
              -Os
also compare with:
snmpbulkwalk

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120227
(Note that the Graphite uses the Orinco card and a different MIB.)

If anyone has any additional SNMP information please let me know.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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magill at mcgillsociety.org
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