Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

eleanorrigby

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 1, 2007
25
0
Belfast, Northern Ireland
My trusty old Airport Express got a bit damaged recently, and while it still works I figured it was time to upgrade to one of those fancy new Airport Extreme (n) gadgets. So when it arrived I set about replacing the Express with the Extreme. I switched the Ethernet cable from the Express to the Extreme, made a new wireless network with the Extreme as the base station, and configured it exactly the same way as the Express - connect to internet using Ethernet and configure IPv4 using DHCP. As far as I can see all the other settings are identical to the way the Express was configured. Yet the Extreme refuses to work - it consistently claims that ""your base station does not have a valid IP address", despite the IP address it displays in the Airport Utility being exactly the same as the one displayed by the Express. When I switch back to the Express everything works perfectly. I cannot for the life of me see where I'm going wrong. Any ideas?

Setup is 2GHz Intel iMac with D-Link DSL-300T ADSL Modem.

Much obliged!
 

CanadaRAM

macrumors G5
My trusty old Airport Express got a bit damaged recently, and while it still works I figured it was time to upgrade to one of those fancy new Airport Extreme (n) gadgets. So when it arrived I set about replacing the Express with the Extreme. <stuff>
Setup is 2GHz Intel iMac with D-Link DSL-300T ADSL Modem.

Most ADSL providers provision the DSL modem for the specific MAC address of the device. If you are changing routers, you will have to either

1) Clone the MAC address of the Express to the Extreme
or
2) Call your DSL provider to change the modem to the new device.
 

macleod199

macrumors 6502
Mar 10, 2007
290
6
Thanks for your reply. I'm sure you're right but I've absolutely no idea what that means. Where do I find a MAC address and how do I clone it? Sorry for being dumb!

The MAC address is a physical address assigned uniquely to every network device (router, network card, etc.) when it's manufactured. It should be somewhere on the bottom of the device, and looks like this: 00:19:AF:32:31:26

Some providers will tie your modem to a specific MAC address, so you can't just randomly change the machine hooked up to it (don't ask me why). The first thing you should try is resetting your modem, that's all it took for me. (Note that unplugging it didn't work for me, I had to press the reset button on the top of the modem.. depending on what kind of modem you have it could be a big button or one you have to poke a pen into to press).

If that doesn't work, you'll have to try to clone the address from the old router to the new one, which I haven't had to do before, but hopefully someone can walk you through.
 

eleanorrigby

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 1, 2007
25
0
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Thanks for the explanation. I tried doing the factory reset thing but that didn't make any difference. Also, my ISP support pages claim they don't link to specific MAC addresses, so I guess that's not the problem either. I have updated my Airport Extreme firmware (which was quite complicated as you have to be connected to the internet and the Extreme at the same time and given that the problem is that the Extreme won't connect to the internet I had to extend the Express network to include the Extreme, which at least proves that the Extreme *does* work, although now my network is back to front...) and I'll have a go to see if that makes a difference. If it doesn't what else can I try - a new modem???
 

eleanorrigby

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 1, 2007
25
0
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Success! I got a new modem (ADSL Nation X-Modem 3), and the manufacturer's website had a support page on using it with an Airport Extreme 11n (http://www.adslnation.com/knowledgebase/xmodem+airport-11n.php). I did what they suggested, which basically involved deleting the DNS Server details from the Airport configuration dialog. It didn't work first time but I fiddled about a little, switched things off and on again a few times, and finally I have a wireless network based on my Airport Extreme which works both with my iMac and my PC laptop. Thanks for your help; glad to have got there in the end.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.