[Ryøkan]

My family has 4 computers on a network. An old non-airport iMac is hooked up by ethernet to a DSL router. The DSL hooks to an Airport Extreme base station. My kids connect to airport on their laptops. I'm in an office out-building about 100 ft. away on an iBook 500. To improve my Airport reception, I bought an Airport Express unit a couple of weeks ago, mounted on a Griffin Airbase. I also use Airport Express to pump music to a stereo in my office.

When I first got Airport Express it took a while to get it onto the network. I tried Airport Set-up Assistant and Airport Admn. Utility and eventually -- I'm not sure what I did -- it recognized the network and everything was working. Green light on; music from iTunes, &c.

A couple of days ago DSL went down. Don't know why. But a day later, after farting around with Airport Setup Assistant for awhile, it was up and running again. Now my wife and kids are on the network, and I can get my iBook on the network, but it's got a new Base Station name. My Airport Express recognizes this to get on the network, but it can't find my stereo speakers in iTunes. The "speakers" (Base Station) button at the bottom of iTunes only shows the old Base Station name.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

-- Ryøkan

[Tomchu]

Can you draw a simple diagram of how your network is laid out, with all of the clients and routers/switches?

I'm having a hard time following exactly what you're doing.

[Ryøkan]

Sorry for the confusion. I don't know how to draw you a picture, so I'll try to describe the set-up more accurately.

Phone line goes to the "in" port of a ZOOM ADSL Bridge Modem. Phone line goes from the "out" port of ZOOM to the phone-input of the Airport Base Station. An Ethernet cable goes from the LAN port of the Airport Base Station to the old iMac. So, the iMac goes on-line through Ethernet.

My kids and I all have iBooks (mine is the oldest, of course) with Airport cards. We go on-line through Airport. Since my iBook is farther away, I've boosted the range with an Airport Express unit. It's just plugged into the wall. The Griffin AirBase just lets it sit on a desk instead of being plugged directly into a wall socket. From Airport Express's mini-phone-jack port I've got a cable running to RCA inputs on my stereo.

My problem is that iTunes only sees the previous Airport Base Station setting (713a97) instead of the new Airport Base Station setting (f5a683). I have no ideas what those numbers and letters mean. Currently, Airport Express seems to work OK to connect me to the Airport Base Station, but it can't find my stereo speakers. I've run airport set-up assistant a bunch of times -- for a while my Airport Express couldn't find the Airport Base Station, but it finally did -- but I don't know what to do with advanced settings.

I hope that helps. Thanks for your interest.

-- Ryøkan

[Tomchu]

It almost sounds to me like the two base stations are hosting seperate networks. Have you used the Airport Admin Utility to check whether the Airport Express is set to extend+repeat the existing network (that is doing all of your Internet stuff)? The name for that is "WDS".

[Ryøkan]

Tomchu-san:

I think you nailed it. Thank you. Among my problems is that I don't understand what most of the options within Airport Admin Utility do. Two base-stations show up in Airport Admin Utility, and I'm not sure if one is a configuration that we're no longer using, or if one is the Airport Base Station and the other is my Airport Express.

In any case, it's working now and I appreciate your help.

[Tomchu]

No problem. :-) I'm glad you figured it out.