Airport and bonjour questions

Hi. I have a nice little setup at home whereby I have a 2011 iMac. ATV2 and two recent iPhones all working together wirelessly on a non-apple router. I don't use wired connections in my setup.

Two things that annoys me are:
1. having to switch on the mac to stream the iTunes library to the ATV.
2. Having to tell the ATV to never sleep so the airplay icon never disappears from the wife's phone

From googling it appears that this is because airplay uses wake on demand via the bonjour protocol whereby bonjour remembers every device on the network and can wake it from sleep when it is needed. It also appears that apple routers are the only commonly used routers that support this.

My questions are as follows:
1. I need to keep my ISPs router connected to the phone line as the primary device, so can I just connect the airport to my router via ethernet and disable the wifi on my ISP router? The apple knowledge base document says the airport must be the main router on the network for wake on demand to work
2. If I get an airport express base station and I set the ATV to sleep will the icon for airplay stay on my wife's phone (obviously so long as she stays on the wifi network)
3. Will the iMac wake up from sleep when I choose 'computers' from the ATV menu?
4. Will an airport express suffice or will I need an extreme? There are no more than 10 devices on the network
5. I've got my ATV and a few other devices on static ips. If I have an airport is it easy to maintain this setup?
6. I'm planning on getting a wireless AirPrint enabled printer. If it is sleeping will I be able to print ok from an iPhone/pad?


Thanks

colshine said:

1 - Is perfectly acceptable - I have a similar config at home.

2 - Just had a quick test with my ATV set to sleep and I can't see the AirPlay icon on the iPhone. I however was able to wake the ATV via the AirPlay feature on my MBP.

3 - My ATV is in the other room and I'm too lazy to go check that for you - sorry.

4 - I got the Extreme as I wanted the extra gigabit ports - if you don't need them then you should be fine.

5. Yes, you can assign static IP's via DHCP in the Airport Utility. I do this to my NAS and MBP.

6. I don't know.

Hope that helps.

Click to expand...

Thanks for taking the time to reply

Thanks for the reply.
#2 strikes me as odd - I'm not doubting what I have been told here, I just expected the icon to appear at all times

colshine said:

I've just done another test and the airplay icon is visible regardless of the ATV being awake or asleep. I think it failed earlier because I didn't have a good wifi signal.

Click to expand...

Some man. Thanks a lot!