How I setup my network using Apple routers

[trucklover]

I wanted to start a thread letting others know how I decided to set up my network using Apple routers, in my case two Airport Extremes.

I'll admit, I'm an Apple user. I love their products and their ease of use. After deciding to go with Amahi for my home and church server needs I needed to learn how to integrate my hda(s) with Apple networking gear. I followed the directions found at http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Airport_express and http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jsp ... dID=121990 to set everything up.

I will say that this setup worked but was not the easiest to follow along. It required the Apple routers to still be a DHCP server even though the hda was a DHCP server.
To give a bit of a background I am one of the tech guys at my church that handles the computers and network. We were using just a plain Linksys router for our network. We had gone through two of them in a years time. We had problems with them resetting themselves to factory default settings regularly. We have lots of computers at our church whether they belong to the church itself or members with their laptops. I wanted a server to handle DHCP, cross platform backups, file sharing, and VPN. I knew that we were eventually going to go with Apple routers so I decided to test this setup at my fiance's house where I have two previous generation Apple routers. This "test" environment was where I learned how to set things up, made mistakes, and just things in general how Amahi operates. I had this test environment up for a couple of months before I decided it was time to move the hda to the church to put into full production use. We have around 150 members with about a third of that heavily relying on the wireless and wired network. The church has computers running Ubuntu, XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Mac OS X. So the church purchased two Airport Extremes to replace the dying Linksys router that we were using. The new Apple routers were the latest type that had dual radios and guest networking capabilities. I hooked everything up at my church just as it was at my fiance's house with similar Apple routers.

So how did it work out you may ask..
It didn't work well to say the least. My problems began with two bad ethernet cables that I was using, one of which was going to the hda. I had the first AE behind the cable modem and the second AE attached via the wired network elsewhere at the church. I had the first router that was facing the internet (CCC-primary) with DHCP turned on and only handing out one address, to the hda. To make a long story short it was a weird setup that just didn't work. I couldn't have the hda being the DHCP server and the CCC-primary router create two networks, the first is the regular wireless network and the second is the guest network for visitors and general church members that we didn't want having access to network printers and the file server, etc. Apple makes it where the Airport Extreme has to be a DHCP server in order for it to create the guest network. There is no way around that. I couldn't have the hda give out addresses on the guest network. I needed to come up with another solution. This setup was just not working.

Here's what I did to make it all work..
I decided to add another router to our network which brings us up to having 3 on the church property. I brought from home a Linksys wired only 4 port router. This router was going to face the internet and do NAT and port forwarding only. I turned off DHCP in the Linksys router and pointed the static DNS settings not to our ISP or to OpenDNS but to the internal IP of our HDA. This allowed urls like http://hda to work as it should. I then put the Apple routers into bridge mode which made them nothing more than a wired switch and wireless access point. This worked out perfectly. One downside to this is that the new feature of having a guest network no longer was an option. So the first Airport Extreme was now wired to the Linksys router and creating a wireless network where the second Airport Extreme could extend the network. I could move the second Apple router wherever I wanted to. It connected wirelessly to the first and repeated the signal providing maximum throughput and coverage to wireless N, B, and G devices. It was also in bridge mode getting it's IP from the hda.

Summary: Here is the list in our gear and what each did.

Cable modem: connects us to the web
Linksys router: DHCP turned off, NAT left on. Created wired only network. IP address of 192.168.1.1
Amahi server: DHCP turned on, DNS, intranet web server, file server, VPN, etc. IP address of 192.168.1.10
First AE: wired gigabit switch, creates wireless network, put into bridge mode, gets IP from HDA. static IP address
Second AE: wireless access point only repeating the signal of the wireless network, gets IP from HDA, put into bridge mode. Non static IP address.

All wired devices on network have a static IP address from the hda. All wireless devices have IP's in the range of 192.168.1.100+ I hope that this information is helpful to other people that are using Apple routers. I still love them but when you have a complicated setup like our church has.. you are going to hit the limits of what it was designed to do out of the box. This is why I had to install another router to do what the Apple routers could not do. I think that having a firmware update for the Apple routers that would allow a user to turn off DHCP would be an important and much needed feature. If you have any questions just ask and I'll try to answer them in this thread.

trucklover