WDS (Wireless range extension) with the Airport Express and WRT54G
I managed to pick up an Airport Express for cheap at the Ultimate Electronics â??We can’t compete with Best Buyâ? celebration (also known as a going out of business in Texas sale, and I wanted to see how many of its cool little abilities I could get working. For the unfamiliar, the Airport Express can do all of the following:
- Act as a pretty capable router all by itself. If you have NOTHING but a cable modem or DSL, and want to share your internet connection wirelessly, the Airport Express will accomplish the trick for you. (Of course, your computers need to have wireless connections)
- It will extend an existing wireless network, acting as a signal repeater, and (theoretically) doubling your range.
- It will share a single USB printer to your entire network.
- It will hook to your home stereo, and allow you to route the output from your iTunes to either the computer or your stereo, with no additional hardware (except the cable from the Airport to the stereo itself)
I already have a wireless network, so I wanted to use all the capabilities except the first. There are a number of web pages dedicated to exactly how to do this, including the fact that you must patch the WRT54G with third party firmware in order to get it to support WDS (the range extending protocol). I’m not going to repeat their work here. You can see it for yourself at http://vafer.org/blog/tcurdt/archives/000184.html and http://ryanschwartz.net/2004/08/05/airtunes-airport-express-and-the-wrt54g.
It works pretty much like they describe, with one exception. My Airport Express would shut down DHCP requests on my network after it obtained an address, thereby preventing my computer from getting an address, and shutting down all internet access.
The solution is to have the Airport Express not request an address from the gateway, but simply assign itself one. (This may be a problem unique to Mac OS X 10.4, as the 10.4.1 update mentions some Airport Express related DHCP fixes. I’m on 10.4.1 now, but have not tested to see if I could turn the dynamic addressing back on, as I’m happy with the way it works now.) Once I assigned a static IP address, the light turned green and the Airport Express worked like a dream.
AirTunes also works well, although it is very sensitive to bad mp3 files. If you have an mp3 with clipping when the music gets loud, you may not hear it on 2 inch computer speakers, but you will if you have a pair of 2 foot tall floor speakers. I may need to rip some of my music again.
I have not yet tested to see if my USB printer can be shared (not all can) but for the price, I’m already impressed with the Airport Express.