Does Airport Extreme base station have a router?

smatanovic

I am contemplating moving from a lousy Linksys B/G router to an Airport Extreme base station. I currently have a Buffalo Linkstation NAS hanging off of my Linksys; will a similar setup work with the LAN port on the Airport Extreme? Or will I neex an additional router?

gwoodpecker

The AirPort Express has a router inside, routing the incoming ethernet signals to the wireless network. It only has one Ethernet port, though, so cou can connect only the NAS device or the ethernet cable from your cable modem (or whatever you have) to it (unless you're using an ethernet switch before the AirPort Express).

smatanovic

Quote:

Originally Posted by gwoodpecker


The AirPort Express has a router inside, routing the incoming ethernet signals to the wireless network. It only has one Ethernet port, though, so cou can connect only the NAS device or the ethernet cable from your cable modem (or whatever you have) to it (unless you're using an ethernet switch before the AirPort Express).

I'm talking about the airport extreme, not the express. The extreme has both a LAN and a WAN port.

smatanovic

I guess my question can be distilled to the following: is there a way to determine specifically what IP address the base station assigns to the LAN port? If DHCP is turned on, IP's are assigned automatically to wireless clients, as well as to the wired client on the LAN port, correct? If so, and I can ascertain the IP assigned to the LAN port, I can acccess a Linkstation on that port.



thanks,

SM

gwoodpecker

Sorry, my bad. Yes, the Extreme has two Ethernet ports: one WAN port (to connect the "internet" cable" and a LAN port (for connecting the NAS device or other computers).



As far as I remember you can have the base station assign dynamic IPs both via for wireless as well as for ethernet-based clients by a built-in DHCP server. BUT you can also set the LAN port to have static IP addresses (in the same subnet as the DHCP server). So you should be able to figure out exactly what port has which address and then assign a specific IP to your NAS box. Remember: the WAN port needs to be on one subnet (which you get from your ISP) and both the wireless and the LAN port share the same subnet (basically, the two are bridged and not routed).

smatanovic

Here's how I solved the problem: I downloaded a neat little program called ip scanner, that scans your network and tells you the IP address of every connected device: easy as pie, I had the ip address for my NAS.



thanks for the help, everyone.