[peterthorn]

I have a Cube and an iBook (both running 10.2.4) and plan to set up a software basestation airport network. The idea is, of course, that the Cube is connected via ethernet and works as basestation (gateway computer).
My question is: will it still work if the Cube is sleeping, or does it have to be "awake"? And if it has to be awake - will it wake up by it self, if I try to connect with the iBook?

TIA,
Peter

[ghporter]

There are a lot of pluses (mostly lower cost) in running Software Base Station, but in many cases it has problems running when the computer goes to sleep.

On the other hand, there are some very inexpensive hardware alternatives available. First, you must understand that "AirPort" is Apple's trade name for IEEE 802.11b standard wireless networking equipment. ANY 802.11b equipment will work with AirPort-brand equipment. It is an unfortunate fact that, while Apple has always been "proud" of its hardware in the price department, it's much prouder of its AirPort products-for what you get they are overpriced.

aaanorton swears by the Netgear MR814 wireless router. With a little shopping you can find this for less than $70. Note that it's a "wireless router," which means that it is not only a wireless access point, but also a gateway router (sometimes called a cable/DSL router). It has a 4-port switch for wired computers and acts as a Network Address Translation firewall. Very nice features for the price.

[Camelot]

As to the specific questions, yes the gateway machine has to be awake - the network is shutdown when the machine is asleep, and no, it will not automatically wake when a wireless machine tries to connect.

In short, if the gateway goes to sleep, the network is offline until you manually wake the gateway machine back up.

There are some software tools available that will let you wake a sleeping machine from another machine on the LAN, so that might be a suitable kludge, but there's really nothing better than a dedicated gateway as GHPorter said.

[peterthorn]

Thanks for both of your answars - very fast!!

Camelot: can you give directions to some of the software tools you mention - or should I be able to find them if searching on versiontracker?
GHPorter: if I use eg the Netgear MR814 (or other non-apple brands) equipment, do I configure it via the Airport utilities (as if it was an ordinary Airport base) on the mac or do I have to use other ways?

Thanks!
Peter

[ghporter]

Configuration is another plus for the non-Apple base stations, at least in my opinion. Just about all of them use a browser interface for configuration, just like a web page, so you can configure them from any computer that's on your network. There's no software to load (or find), and it's pretty easy to manage all of the options.

[aaanorton]

Originally posted by GHPorter:
aaanorton swears by the Netgear MR814 wireless router. With a little shopping you can find this for less than $70.

50 bucks today at buy.com. This makes it tough to argue for a software base set up. These routers are dirt cheap, simple and effective. If you get one, you'll soon wonder why anyone would do otherwise...

[peterthorn]

Originally posted by aaanorton:
50 bucks today at buy.com. This makes it tough to argue for a software base set up. These routers are dirt cheap, simple and effective. If you get one, you'll soon wonder why anyone would do otherwise...

Hmm - as much as I would love to use the offer, I, unfortunately, have to buy for over $500 to get them to ship it to Denmark (and amazon, who has the same offer, doesn't even allow me to buy it when I'm not situated in the US).
But thanks a lot for the tip anyway, aaanorton!
I'll try to think of a way to get around the trouble

Peter

edit: I just saw that outpost.com has it for $45.99 - but still no export