I have been struggling with this for over an hour now. I have my Airport Base-station hooked up to a hub which is hooked up to my router which is hooked up to my modem. I can't for the life of me figure out how to configure the base-station to allow me to wirelessly access my external hard drives and printer that are connected to the base-station. What am I doing wrong?
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How do I set up my Airport Extreme behind my router for drive & printer sharing?
- Thread starter magiic
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magiic, we need a little more details. What kind of printer and drive are you trying to connect? Can you at least connect to the AEBS with a wireless machine and get to the internet? I mean, is the AEBS working at all? Do you see it in the Airport Utility?
I dont have much experience with configuring the AEBS as an access point instead of a router. So Ill tell you how I set mine up... Mine is set up as my router directly connected to the modem. I then have a external HDD (Drobo) and my Canon connected to a USB hub connected to the AEBS.
This required me to format the external drive as HFS+ in order for it to be recognized by the AEBS. Formatting the drive requires you to plug it directly into a Mac, or if using a PC, a program like MacDrive or MacDisc to format it.
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
http://www.macdisk.com/mden.php3
I then unplugged the Drobo from my PC and plugged it into the AEBS. The AEBS saw the drive connected pretty much right away. Click the Disk tab in the Airport Utility and configure sharing by setting a disc access password. Then update the AEBS.
Then, I installed the Airport Utility on all my PCs and restarted them. Once restarted, Airdisk automatically saw the Drobo and asked what I wanted to do. I selected "connect to the drive" and provided the password. The drive mounted as my Z: drive automatically. Contrary to a lot of the articles Ive read, I did not have to map it as a network drive. It appeared in My Computer as Z: without me doing anything but entering my password into the Airdisk popup window. I did this on all my PCs and I now have a shared drive on my network.
http://www.drobospace.com/article/10425/Share-Drobo-on-a-Network--Apple-Airport-Extreme/
This is for the Drobo but should apply to any external drive. As I said though, the last page in this walk through mentions mounting the drive as a network location, but instead, just check your My Computer (If on a PC) to see if the drive appears on its own.
For the printer, this was a little more difficult. I erased all my current printers from the PCs. I then plugged the printer into the AEBS. Then, I had to turn off the printer, then unplug the AEBS, then turn the printer back on and plug back in the AEBS. Somehow, this helped the Airport Utility to see my printer. After doing this, my Canon appeared in the printer window of my Airport Utility. Once I got the AEBS to see my printer, I then had to run Bonjour for Windows to install the printer. http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows.html
Once the printer was installed, DO NOT attempt to print a test page, it didnt work for me, Im not sure if it works for anyone. I actually selected a couple of pictures and printed those to test its functionality.
http://tech.ifelix.net/1004.html
Not sure if you are on PCs or a Mac. The link above has some Mac solutions as well as a compatibility list of printers tested with the AEBS.
Anyway, hope this helps. I dont have my mac yet so my setup is dependant on PCs, so your steps might be different. There are plenty of threads around here that explain other peoples findings while setting this up. Just do a search and you should be able to find something if my info wasnt helpful enough.
I dont have much experience with configuring the AEBS as an access point instead of a router. So Ill tell you how I set mine up... Mine is set up as my router directly connected to the modem. I then have a external HDD (Drobo) and my Canon connected to a USB hub connected to the AEBS.
This required me to format the external drive as HFS+ in order for it to be recognized by the AEBS. Formatting the drive requires you to plug it directly into a Mac, or if using a PC, a program like MacDrive or MacDisc to format it.
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
http://www.macdisk.com/mden.php3
I then unplugged the Drobo from my PC and plugged it into the AEBS. The AEBS saw the drive connected pretty much right away. Click the Disk tab in the Airport Utility and configure sharing by setting a disc access password. Then update the AEBS.
Then, I installed the Airport Utility on all my PCs and restarted them. Once restarted, Airdisk automatically saw the Drobo and asked what I wanted to do. I selected "connect to the drive" and provided the password. The drive mounted as my Z: drive automatically. Contrary to a lot of the articles Ive read, I did not have to map it as a network drive. It appeared in My Computer as Z: without me doing anything but entering my password into the Airdisk popup window. I did this on all my PCs and I now have a shared drive on my network.
http://www.drobospace.com/article/10425/Share-Drobo-on-a-Network--Apple-Airport-Extreme/
This is for the Drobo but should apply to any external drive. As I said though, the last page in this walk through mentions mounting the drive as a network location, but instead, just check your My Computer (If on a PC) to see if the drive appears on its own.
For the printer, this was a little more difficult. I erased all my current printers from the PCs. I then plugged the printer into the AEBS. Then, I had to turn off the printer, then unplug the AEBS, then turn the printer back on and plug back in the AEBS. Somehow, this helped the Airport Utility to see my printer. After doing this, my Canon appeared in the printer window of my Airport Utility. Once I got the AEBS to see my printer, I then had to run Bonjour for Windows to install the printer. http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows.html
Once the printer was installed, DO NOT attempt to print a test page, it didnt work for me, Im not sure if it works for anyone. I actually selected a couple of pictures and printed those to test its functionality.
http://tech.ifelix.net/1004.html
Not sure if you are on PCs or a Mac. The link above has some Mac solutions as well as a compatibility list of printers tested with the AEBS.
Anyway, hope this helps. I dont have my mac yet so my setup is dependant on PCs, so your steps might be different. There are plenty of threads around here that explain other peoples findings while setting this up. Just do a search and you should be able to find something if my info wasnt helpful enough.
What exactly do you mean by "hub"? Do you have your modem plugged into a router, which is then relaying the signal to the Airport Extreme? If so, why don't you just remove the other router and use the Airport Extreme as your wireless router. I just installed by Airport Extreme two days ago, and I simply plugged my printer into it. To access the printer from a PC, you have to download Bonjour for Windows from Apple's website to set up the printer. It was really simple from my MacBook, I believe that it just showed up or something easy like that. That is all I can help with for now, is there anything else you can tell us?
Yeah, I would suggest the same thing, use the Airport as the router, take out the middle man.
Let me better explain our networking set-up. On the ground floor of the house in my dads office. The router is hooked up to our ADSL modem. A length of cat5 cable is running up through the floor from the router to my room it goes into a four port switch, one cable runs from the switch to my xbox and the other runs currently to my AEBS. I have an HP Photosmart D5160 printer hooked up to the AEBS as well as a 1TB MyBook (NTFS), 500GB Seagate Passport (HFS+ Im assuming as it is used for time machine) and a 200GB drive in an enclosure (FAT32). I unfortunately cannot replace the router with the AEBS because it's on another floor.
So far I seem to be able to connect to the internet through it. I have been able to configure it with the Airport Utility but cant seem to find the right set-up for drive/printer sharing. I am using a Macbook Pro.
So far I seem to be able to connect to the internet through it. I have been able to configure it with the Airport Utility but cant seem to find the right set-up for drive/printer sharing. I am using a Macbook Pro.
Im making progress. I am currently connected to the internet through the base station. I still cannot seem to access the hard drives though. It is showing them in the airport utility but I cant figure out how to connect to them.
Ok I have managed to access to of the 3 drives. The 1TB Mybook is being told to get repaired in disk utility. Also I cannot time machine to pick up the 500GB drive to resume my time machine backups.
EDIT: I got Time Machine to detect the 500GB drive but I still cannot get it to back up to it. It just says unable to mount.
EDIT: It also will not let me do anything with the time machine backs up on the drive, it just lets me look at "current" and I cant go back when in reality there is over a months worth of back-ups.
EDIT: I got Time Machine to detect the 500GB drive but I still cannot get it to back up to it. It just says unable to mount.
EDIT: It also will not let me do anything with the time machine backs up on the drive, it just lets me look at "current" and I cant go back when in reality there is over a months worth of back-ups.
define "change the settings" I changed it to use the "new" drive if thats what you mean?