1) Reset your Base Station. Go to Apple's web page here and following their instructions to do a Forced Reload. Note that when you do this any previous settings in your Base Station will be irrevocably lost and the unit will be set back to its factory settings.

2) After the Base Station is reset, it is very important that you run the AirPort Setup Assistant (ASA). The reason for this is that one of the questions ASA asks you is whether or not your DSL provider requires you to connect with PPPoE (PPP Over Ethernet). For example, my provider, Pacific Bell requires PPPoE. In fact, you cannot even connect to their service without their PPPoE client - unless of course you let the AirPort Base Station do it for you! :-) This is their way of monitoring and making sure you only have one DHCP connection at a time. Note that you cannot setup the AirPort Base Station using ASA unless you have first reset your Base Station using a Forced Reload as shown at Apple's web page. You MUST do this reset *before* you run ASA. Once you have done the reset, launch ASA. Select the middle option "Set up an AirPort Base Station" (shown disabled in this diagram):

You can fill in most of the default settings yourself (they are pretty self explanatory). The one important point is that when ASA asks you if you connect to your DSL provider via PPPoE, it is very important that you select "Yes" before you go to the next step. When you select "Yes" and go to the next step (and this is critical), you will be asked to input your PPPoE account login name and password. You must get this information exactly right as required by your DSL provider. This is usually just the same login name and password that you would normally enter into your PPPoE client software. It is this connection that allows the Base Station to connect to your DSL account and connection. If any of the information in this step is incorrect, the Base Station will not connect to your DSL, and no other internet access will be possible. Essentially what happens is that the Base Station acts as the *single* allowed DHCP connection to your DSL account and then the Base Station uses NAT to parcel out IP numbers to all the client connections (AirPort or Ethernet) - your DSL provider has no idea nor any way of knowing what is going on on your side of the connection - all it knows is that your one allowed PPPoE connection has been made via the user name and login info. All the magic happens inside the Base Station - using NAT, it in effect becomes your own private wireless DHCP server (ok, just tell me Apple isn't cool for having considered all this ahead of time). At any rate, once the PPPoE stuff is entered, just walk through the rest of the ASA and finish its setup. Once this is done, go to the next step below.

3) Launch Apple's AirPort Admin Utility Application located in your Applications/Apple Extras/AirPort folder. Click the first tab labeled "AirPort" as shown below. Enter a Name in the Identity section (this is name of the Base Station itself and doesn't really matter - it can be any name you like). You can change the Base Station password by clicking the "Change Base Station Password" button, or you can leave the password set to whatever you set it to when you ran the ASA in Step 2 above). Note that the Base Station's password should be different than the AirPort Network's password. If the two passwords are the same, then any user who logs into the AirPort network will be able to run the AirPort Admin Utility on their client computer and change the Base Station's settings!!! ASA should have prompted you asking if you wanted to select a different password for the Base Station, to which you should have replied "Yes" and entered a password. Anyway, next type a name for the AirPort network you are setting up. This can be any name you like. Next, of critical importance is the "Create a closed network" checkbox. If you leave this box *unchecked*, then the AirPort network name you just entered will show up on the "Choose network" popup menu in every user's AirPort control panel. This is a potential security risk because to join the AirPort network, a cleint must know the exact name and password to login. If you don't check the "Create a closed network" checkbox, then you have just given the network name to any wireless browser who might happen to be in the vicinity. On the other hand, if you *don't* turn this checkbox on, then people wanting to join you AirPort netwrok must type the exact *name* of the network *and* the exact password - which makes it harder to log in. In summary:

1) Turn this checkbox on and users must know the exact name *and* password to login. (Higher security, but more difficult access).

2) Turn this checkbox *off* and users will be shown the exact network name but must still type the password to login. (Lower security, but easier access).

Next, be sure to check the "Enable encryption (using WEP)" checkbox. Despite all the hysteria over WEP's security holes, some level of encryption is better than NO encryption.

4) Next, click the "Network" tab. This is where the magic happens. Check "Distribute IP addresses" checkbox. This tells the base Station to parcel out the IP addresses to client machines. Then click the "Share a single IP address (using DHCP & NAT)" radio button. This allows the Base Station to decide what actual IP addresses get parceled out automatically. If you are running servers on your network, then you might want to use the other option "Share a range of IP addresses" instead. This is more difficult however, because if you use this option, you must then set the range of IP addresses to be parcelled out, and *then* you must also manually set each client's IP address. The addresses must match or the client won't get any internet connectivity. If you are part of a larger LAN or WAN, these addresses must be in the range that the LAN or WAN allows or else other machines on the network might not be able to see your client machines on your AirPort network. If you only have client machines on your AirPort network, use "Share a sinlge IP address (using DHCP & NAT)" - it's far easier to set up both on the Base Station and on the clients.

Next check the "Enable DHCP server on Ethernet" checkbox - this setting tells the Base Station to also field DHCP requests from client computers connected via Ethernet (rather than connected via AirPort). This option basically allows the Base Station to do the same thing for wired Ethernet clients as it does for AirPort clients - namely assign them an IP address using DHCP when they request it.

Next check the "Enable AirPort to Ethernet bridging" checkbox - this setting tells the Base Station to exchange data between AirPort and wired Ethernet connections and is neccessary to allow wired Ethernet clients and AirPort clients to talk. If you leave this option unchecked, for example, you might lose services such as Appletalk if you try to connect to a wired Ethernet client from an AirPort client using MacOS 9 File Sharing.

5) Next if you want to access certain internet server services such as Web, FTP, etc. which reside on your network, click the "Port mapping" button to display the dialog shown below. This dialog allows you to map port numbers for services on servers to the Base Station's private IP address, or a client's IP address.

6) Next click the "Access Control" tab. *Only* if you want to restrict who can log in to the network with a password, add users here. If you don't add any users here, then *anyone* with the correct network name and password can log into your AirPort network.

7) Next click the "Optimize Placement…" button. In the window shown below, you can track the signal-to-noise ratio from the Base Station to your AirPort client machine. You can move the Base Station around and watch the graph at the bottom and the Signal Strength and Noise Level bars to determine where the Base Station should be placed for optimal transception.

7) Next close the "Optimize Placement" dialog and click the "Update" button. This uploads all the new settings to the AirPort Base Station. The base Station will then restart (which takes about 30 seconds). After the Base Station restarts, reboot your Mac.

8) The next step is the obvious part most people overlook. After reboot, open the "AirPort" control panel application (not the Setup Assistant, or Admin Utility), make sure AirPort is on (click "Turn AirPort On" if it isn't), check "Allow selection of closed networks", and then choose "Other" from the Choose Network popup menu. When prompted, type the name of the AirPort network you created, and its password. Remember that the password for the AirPort network may be different from the Base Station's password. Do *not* enter your DSL login name and password here - enter the AirPort network name and password that you created using ASA and the AirPort Admin Utility. Once you enter the network name and password and click "OK", you should automatically see the AirPort network name, "Connected to the Internet via PPPoE", and the Signal Level bar indicator at the top of the AirPort window. You are now connected to the internet via AirPort, DSL, and PPPoE. You can connect multiple computers to the internet through this same configuration on many different client machines - your DSL provider will have no idea how many clients are connected because all the connections are all going therough the single Base Station PPPoE connection. If you checked "Enable AirPort to Ethernet bridging", then this is true for all your AirPort *and* wired Ethernet computers.

You have just faked-out your DSL provider and now have your own DHCP server. Simply configure all your client computers to connect using DHCP and you can have a virtually unlimited number of clients connecting to your one DSL connection.

Best of all, you can now ditch your ISP's proprietary PPPoE client software and simply set your TCP/IP connection to connect via AirPort using DHCP. In my experience, this setup even provides a *faster* connection than using the provider's PPPoE client (because there is one less protocol layer to go through on your client when you don't have to use the provider's PPPoE client software).

Enjoy!

 

 

My setup: An AirPort™ Base Station, DSL modem, and Snap! Server all feeding into an Ethernet hub.