Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan » Airport Extreme

IPv6 Firewall Airport Upgrade

Matt — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:41:22 +0000

In the latest firmware upgrade for Airport Extreme N servers, there is a new setting for IPv6 Firewall.

Airport Extreme Base Station Printing

Matt — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:23:19 +0000

Printer sharing via the Airport Extreme Base Station is great. Once you have installed Bonjour for Windows clients too, then everyone can find the printer easily, and print to it.

Except if you happen to turn off your printer, and then restart your base station. When you turn the printer back on, it won’t be recognised by the base station.

Unplugging the USB printer and plugging it back in fixes the issue with not being able to find it.

This is kind of annoying, as we turn our printer off when it is not in use. And I often need to restart the base station (that’s’ the other thing. If you even add a port forwarding entry, you need to restart the stupid thing!).

Airport Extreme DHCP and LAN DNS

Matt — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 16:03:56 +0000

I use a local DHCP server to also act as my caching DNS, with the nice side effect that it also serves DNS requests for machines inside my LAN that have gotten their IP addresses via DHCP. Until this afternoon, this was my clunky old SpeedTouch modem. Today, I put that modem into bridge mode, and set up my brand spanking new Airport Extreme to do the PPPoE connection, and handle all of the routing, DHCP and DNS duties. It’s newer, right, so it should do a better job?

Wrong.

It does everything I want, except serve local DNS results. So, if I try to connect to one of my many machines, then it fails. And since I’ve gone from DHCP with reserved leases to a free-for-all DHCP, I have no idea which machine is which IP address!

This is very frustrating, and is exactly the reason I retired the Netgear from this task, as it had exactly the same behaviour. It hands out IP addresses, but doesn’t store the machine names.

Now, let me remind you this was working perfectly with the Airport Extreme just running in bridge mode. Everything else is set up right (apart from the fact it isn’t really using the DNS settings I set for it!), but it won’t do this.

I’m sorely tempted to go back to how I had it all set up before. The only functionality I will lose is that VM machines connected over a bridged airport connection will not get an IP address from the SpeedTouch DHCP server. They do from either the Netgear, or the Airport Extreme, if I configure that way.

I’m really annoyed about this. It’s a vital part of my daily use - I have fileservers, including one that stores all Music, and a fax/scanner server, which I don’t want to have to hard code IP addresses into.

I’m thinking I may be able to go all Bonjour/Zeroconf/mDNSresponder. I’ll see how that goes.

VMWare Fusion, bridged AirPort and DHCP

Matt — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 14:51:33 +0000

Things are strange.

If I use my VMWare Fusion machine at work, then it gets it’s own IP address from the DHCP server, as expected. I use Bridged mode over the AirPort connection.

If I try the same at home, I don’t get an IP.

I’ll try the other base station. I don’t know if it is the router or the DHCP server, but something isn’t working…

Temporary Post

Matt — Thu, 15 Jan 1970 03:42:48 +0000

That’s purpose is just to trigger Wordpress to update the Post count of each Category.

I’ll leave it here incase I need to redo this operation. It took me ages to tick each category box…