[X4U] Airport upgrade troubles

[db]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:50:52 +0100, Xavier Noria wrote:
> Thank you! Unfortunately it didn't work here, the base station even 
> didn't show up in the admin utility. I tried the 1 second reset, and 
> the 5 seconds reset, no luck.

You're not the only one having these types of problems with Airport, and don't feel bad, the fixes are generic and just basically good luck wishes. One thing about really resetting the airport: sometimes in order to get your computer to see it when its plugged in via the cable, you have to do stuff like set your IP to: 192.42.249.14 with the router as 192.42.249.13 and the subnet mask as 255.255.255.0. It's retarded, but what can you do. 

> I am not very familiar with networks, but looks like the base station 
> somehow justs passes its IP to the PowerBook, because when the base 
> station wasn't plugged into the router the laptop had a 10.0.x.x 
> address, and the tools found the base station at 10.0.1.1.

Huh, yea I don't think I understand... but if it's finding it at 10.1.1.1 then the base station is doing NAT.

> Afterwards, when I put the Ethernet cable in the plug again and renew 
> DHCP, the laptop got a 192.168.x.x that looks like an IP from the 
> router.

That IP is a self-assigned IP, meaning when the computer (or the airport) can't for some reason get an IP via DHCP, it just assigns itself that for lack of anything better to do.

> If the interface is different it may happen that the laptop 
> just didn't resolve 10.0.1.1 in the router's network. Does that make 
> sense? Why is not the base station managing its own network and doing 
> NAT towards the router?

You you need to have "share this network via NAT & DHCP" selected in the airport admin for the router, which tells it to do NAT, which I'm assuming you've done. There might be something funky going on between the base station and the router upstream... to where it doesn't think you're on the same network.

There have been a ton of reports of this in the forums (apple has a habit of deleting them), and a lot of them orient around Comcast, etc. Apple has never really offered a fix for the affected users, although they did say once that they thought it had something to do with the Airport base station getting the subnets confused: I.E., the base station somehow thinks it's on one, and thinks everyone trying to access the base station is on another. Things went really weird between 10.3 and one of the firmware updates, with most people I know who had the problem giving up and considering it a couple of hundred dollars down the drain.

It generally only affects Airport's: plug in any other model from another company, and it works great.

drunkenbatman ( there! )