November 2001
Beginner
144 pages
3h 41m
English
Content preview from Building Wireless Community NetworksBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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The Apple AirPort Base Station
The Mac AirPort is a tremendously popular access point. It looks like a slick, retro-futuristic prop from “War of the Worlds,” and it is very portable and rugged. While designed for use with the Mac platform, it works very well as a general purpose access point (and you don’t even need a Mac to configure it; see the next section). As I write this, the AirPort sells retail for about $299. What does that get you?
Direct Ethernet bridging
DHCP/NAT
56K dialup modem port
User-definable ESSID
Roaming support
MAC address filtering
WEP encryption
What doesn’t it get you? It has only one radio (actually, an embedded Orinoco Silver card) and no external antenna connector. But this isn’t much of a problem, because the internal Silver card itself has an external connector. See http://homepage.mac.com/hotapplepi/airport/or http://www.wwc.edu/~frohro/Airport/Airport.htmlfor examples of how to add your own antenna.
Out of the box, the AirPort will try to get a DHCP lease from the Ethernet and start serving NAT and DHCP on the wireless with no password. Yes, by simply plugging your new toy into your LAN, you have eliminated all of the hard work that went into setting up your firewall. Anyone within earshot now has unrestricted wireless access to the network you plugged it into!
While this could be handy as a default configuration (say, at a conference or other public access network), this probably isn’t what you want. To change the defaults, you’ll need configuration software. ...
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