Posts Tagged ‘routers’

One of the problems with the new AirPort Utility, 6.0+, is that it doesn’t have a DHCP clients table. This is obviously ridiculous, as anything claiming to be a router that can act as a DHCP server needs to have one, so I phoned AppleCare to sort it out.

They first asked me for the product’s serial number. But the problem is, this is genuinely invisible.

It’s below all those big symbols. Can you read that? I certainly can’t. No matter how close I move my face (human optics lacking a zoom function after all) and my eyesight is pretty good. Luckily, I managed to find it via AirPort Utility.

After some digging with first line, and some more with the senior I was passed through to, they eventually sorted it out for me – fair play to them as they basically spent twenty minutes talking me through how to bypass all of Apple’s security lockdowns to get the old software installed that does have the functionality.

Unfortunately by this point I had been on the call almost an hour, at a cost of £10 to myself, but they did at least solve the problem.

Two routers on one network, that is crazy talk. It is indeed but the problem is that with everyone trying to provide out of the box home network solutions at cheap prices, routers are bundled in with everything. It seems these days you can’t buy a networking hub without getting a router with it.

Picture the situation. A few years ago you bought a Linksys 4 port switch / cable router so you could connect several computers to your internet connection. Now you want to go wireless with your laptop and so you buy a wireless access point. However it comes bundled 4 integrated wired ports and a router too. It happens, it happened to me.

They can co-exist quite peacefully though. That said it isn’t plug and play. I never expected it to be though. I thought when I got the first router it wouldn’t be but that plugged in and worked fine pretty much straight away. And to be honest, this wasn’t much harder.

First thing you want to do is to plug your new router into a separate computer disconnected from the network and head to setup. Here you want to change its address on the network.

The main problem I had was that both routers were trying to use port 192.168.1.1, which was not a good situation. So I connected the second router to my laptop and changed its port to 192.168.1.5.

Then you connect everything together. In this case I connected a cable into the uplink port of my first router and plugged the other end into one of the standard network ports on the second router. I’m guessing you can also plug a cable into a standard network port on the first one too, though I didn’t try that.

As only one actually needs to route internet traffic and such I then went to my second router and disabled the local DHCP server. This one was basically just acting as more ports to my main router.

And that is all you need to do? Simple huh? Well actually save the relaxation for when you actually have it working as you know how reliable technology is ;). Once done, sit back, log onto IM and brag about your advanced network.