Building Wireless Community Networks, Second Edition

Access Point Management Software

If you have a Mac handy, you are in luck. The AirPort Admin utility that ships with the AirPort is excellent. As with their entire product line, Apple has gone out of their way to make the whole AirPort system easy to set up, even for beginners. If you don’t own a Mac, you have a couple of options. It turns out that the innards of the Graphite AirPort are virtually identical to the Orinoco RG-1000 (previously, the Lucent Residential Gateway). That means that the RG configuration utility for Linux (called cliproxy) also works fine with the AirPort. Unfortunately, as the Lucent product family has been sold and resold several times in the past couple of years (the same product line has been called Lucent, Orinoco, Agere, Avaya, and Proxim, and probably a couple of others that I’ve missed), the cliproxy utility seems to have disappeared from the Proxim web site. Copies of it are still floating around on various message boards; it is a tremendously useful utility if you can find it. Jon Sevy has done extensive work with the AirPort, and has released an open source Java client that configures the AirPort (both Graphite and Snow) and the RG-1000. You can get a copy from http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/sevy/airport/. He has also compiled a tremendous amount if information on the inner workings of the AirPort, and has many resources online at this site. Since his utility is open source, cross-platform, and works very well, we’ll use it in the following ...