Using the Network Troubleshooter, I failed step 9

[retinalcircus]

Using the Network Troubleshooter, I failed step 9 - HDA used as DNS on clients?. Here's a paste to help troubleshoot: http://amahi.pastebin.com/P7nMd3Wr

Thanks in advance

Bill

[bigfoot65]

Did you turn off the DHCP and/or DNS server for your router? Also, did you renew the DHCP lease for the clients. This is necessary to ensure Amahi provides the DHCP lease to clients after install.

[retinalcircus]

Thank you for your help, bigfoot!

I "turned off" the DHCP in my Airport Extreme Base Station (Apple) WiFi router to the greatest extent possible. (I followed the wiki on using Airport. I hope I did it right.) Long story short, Airport can't turn off DHCP w/o also turning off NAT; so you have to trick it by constraining its DHCP pool to just 1 number, so the HDA can pick up the rest of the slack and effectively function as the DNS or DHCP or whatever it's supposed to do. (Networking is difficult for me, BTW.)

I stopped and restarted Airport connectivity in the client Macbook. But now it sees itself as owning the one number I allowed the Airport Extreme Base Station's DHCP. Shouldn't that number be going to the HDA instead? And then the HDA will assign everything else in my network a number like it should? Confused on this point. BTW, Airport Extreme Base Station gets internet from a cable modem. The HDA (on Fedora 14 on an old Dell) gets internet on eth0 from an ethernet cable connected to network out port on Airport Extreme.

Anyway. The answer to both your questions is "YES". To the best of of my ability, I have done those things.

Thanks again for assistance...

Bill

[retinalcircus]

This follow-up post may be TMI, but here goes...

I followed the link in the wiki to the Airport Extreme DHCP workaround. I pasted the steps below:

0. Power off as many systems as you can to keep things simple, though you'll have to keep at least one computer up to run Airport Administration.

1. Using Airport Administration, configure the DHCP lease time to be essentially forever. (I used 8000 days, or 20+ years, which ought to be good enough).

2. On the DHCP address pool, select other and then specify a pool size of 2. In my case I used 172.16.1.1 - 172.16.1.2. (It seems that you have to do step 1 first.) Now the Airport Extreme will only have one address (e.g. 172.16.1.2) to give out since it uses the other address (e.g. 172.16.1.1) for itself.

3. Release and renew the IP address on the one computer you're using. (In Windows, that's IPCONFIG /RELEASE and then IPCONFIG /RENEW from the command line; in Mac OS X uncheck and then recheck the appropriate network port in System Preferences -> Network -> Network Port Configurations). At this point your computer has grabbed the one and only IP address the Airport can hand out, and as far as Airport is concerned, the lease is practically permanent.

4. Configure your local DHCP server. Be sure to specify the Airport Extreme (e.g. 172.16.1.1) as the default gateway or default router. Also, the IP address range should be in the same subnet as the Airport Extreme, but without overlapping its 2 addresses. I used 172.16.1.100 - 172.16.1.199.

5. Disconnect the Airport Extreme from the local network.

6. Release and renew the IP address of the local system again. This time it will get an IP address from the local server instead of the Airport Extreme.

7. Reconnect the Airport Extreme.

Voila, the Airport Extreme is happily functioning as a NAT device for all your computers, but they're getting their IP addresses and other information from a different server.

END PASTED TEXT
I think I got steps 1 thru 3 right.
Step 4 has got me beat. I cannot seem to find any way in Amahi to configure its DHCP server. I am running Amahi beta under Fedora 14.
Step 5 does this mean disconnect the ethernet cable from the cable modem, or shut it off entirely? If I shut it off, my client macbook will not get any internet (its only got wifi connectivity because the Dell running Amahi has the only available wired internet connection). Or should I shut off the Dell for all or part of this process? I've had it on for all steps so far.
Step 6 the "local system" is the Dell running Amahi or the client Macbook? Assuming it's the Macbook, doesn't the Amahi box AND the Macbook need to be internet connected for this to work?
Step 7 plug it back in to the internet - OR - turn it back on - I think I can handle that.

Sorry for the lengthy post. I am confused. Amahi folks must be slammed with trying to get out of beta, too. I do appreciate any help offered. Thanks,

Bill

[retinalcircus]

SOLVED

I needed to constrain the addresses that the Airport Extreme's DHCP could allocate to the one (same start and end value) address of the HDA.