Airport Extreme Capabilities

[cpjakes]

Hi everyone,

I've looked around and cannot find definite answers to my questions, maybe the terminology on Apple's end is different. Anyway, my current Netgear router is on its way out and since I'm tired of replacing them (Netgear, Linksys, and D-Link), I thought I'd give Apple a try in this department...

However, there are a few things that I've gotten used to. The question is, can I still do them with the Airport Extreme...

1) DNS through dyndns.com
2) Port forwarding (is this what they call port mapping?)
3) Static internal IP addresses
4) Can the USB drive connected to the base station be accessed remotely or is it strictly from the inside?

The other possibility is a different brand of gigabit ethernet wireless router that is actually reliable... I'm open to suggestions...

Thanks in advance,
cpjakes

[itickings]

Port forwarding (mapping) and static* internal IP:s will work just fine. I haven't had any need to research dyndns or remote access to the drive though.

*) By static internal IP:s, I assume you mean the possibility to reserve a specific IP address for a specific computer. The Extreme supports reserving IP- addresses based on the DHCP Client ID or the MAC address of the computer. Manually configuring client computers for fixed IP:s will work too of course.

[cpjakes]

Right - I would like to have each of my computers have a certain IP so I can remote access different services on different machines without the IPs changing all the time. I'd like to avoid static IPs on the machine side because I always forget when I take my laptop out, etc.

Remote drive access isn't critical since most things will live on a machine on the other side.

Thanks for your response!

cpjakes

Port forwarding (mapping) and static* internal IP:s will work just fine. I haven't had any need to research dyndns or remote access to the drive though.

*) By static internal IP:s, I assume you mean the possibility to reserve a specific IP address for a specific computer. The Extreme supports reserving IP- addresses based on the DHCP Client ID or the MAC address of the computer. Manually configuring client computers for fixed IP:s will work too of course.

[skorpien]

I haven't had experience with this, but I believe the Extreme has an option to share the HDD through WAN (remote access).

As for the Reserved DHCP, I make use of this with ALL devices on my network. It works wonders for laptops since I don't have to mess around with the IP settings when taking it away from my home network.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=AirPortUtility/5.1/en/ap2105.html
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=AirPortUtility/5.1/en/ap2051.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24799

Cant help with the DNS part, sorry. Maybe a search in Apple's Support pages will yield something?