[Sosa]

Greetings,

Recently my 2 year old airport extreme base station stopped responding. It occurred after my provider disconnected my internet connection and I was trying to configure it to access my neighbor's connection! After it rebooted itself my computer would no longer pick up its signals, even using the Airport Utility (I was still however able to pick up my neighbor's network from my computer so it was not an airport card issue). Now I've reestablished my internet access and can confirm it functions via use of an ethernet cable directly to my powerbook. The base station refuses to respond, even after trying the recommended procedure to reestablish original preferences by pressing the reboot button for 5 sec and, when that didn't work, doing so while replugging it to the electricity.

I'm out of ideas here. There is no apparent damage to the base station. My wife mentioned she smelled a burn but I haven't. I'm wondering if my first reboot a few days ago fried something internally? I mean what is the failure rate on these things? I have the square shaped unit without a hard drive.

[Sosa]

I was able to communicate with it via an Ethernet cable, restore my original settings, and change it back from trying to connect to my neighbor's network. Works fine again. I tried the ethernet but I didn't think it was going to work!

[ghporter]

Glad you got it working for you again. I always recommend using an Ethernet cable to configure and manage any wireless router, and AirPort devices especially. I would consider that to be the "first and best" tactic when any such device doesn't respond appropriately.