[Andrew Stephens]

I'm trying to connect a new airport base station to an existing wireless network but it's not going easy.


The existing hub is a netgear wireless adsl router. The iMac finds the router fine and the internet works fine but I want to add on the aiport base station to extend the range of the network throughout the house and so far the airport base station doesn't want to play.

I have enabled additional wireless base stations in the netgear control panel and it seems to see an unidentified base station which I assume to be the airport one.

Using the aiarport setup utility I keep getting asked if I want to switch my network settings to configure the airport station, even though the airport station is currently connected to the netgear router by ethernet cable too.

Anyone go t a step by step here?

Thanks

Andrew

[Andrew Stephens]

Ok so the base station is now sitting connected to the router via ethernet and is running in bridge mode so I can log onto the base station network and browse the net fine.

However what I need is to for the base station to join the same network as the main wireless router so that I can place it in another room to create a WDS.

Can't find any WDS setting son the main router so it may not offer this service. I know that airport express blocks will only extend an airport network so I'm beginning to guess that the whole Airport eco system is somewhat closed.

Any ideas?

[Simon]

For this to work your router will have to allow you to set it up for WDS.

Make sure the network name of your AirPort Extreme is set to the same as the SSID of your router. Set the wireless mode of your AirPort Extreme to "Participate in a WDS network" and chose the same channel as your router is on. Then set the WDS mode to "WDS Remote" and enter the MAC address of your router.

See also Designing AirPort Networks Using AirPort Utility (page 44).

[ghporter]

Are you intending to "extend" your range by placing the Extreme at some point away from your existing router, or simply because the new Extremes have better range to start with? This makes a huge difference-Simon's suggestion should rock for the former, but the latter is a completely different matter-bridge mode should have turned the Extreme into simply a wireless access point with all address management being handled by the Netgear router (unless this AirPort base is different from all previous ones).

[Simon]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

Are you intending to "extend" your range by placing the Extreme at some point away from your existing router, or simply because the new Extremes have better range to start with?

I would guess the former since the OP wrote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens

However what I need is to for the base station to join the same network as the main wireless router so that I can place it in another room to create a WDS.

[Andrew Stephens]

Hi ghporter

The latter is the case here. The houses around here are made from super thick and absorbant Cotswold stone so radio signals just get swallowed up.

The plan was to place the airport base station in a room at teh other end of the house so that wireless internet was available in all rooms.
I've got it functioning happily as a bridge though