airport and users

boomtopper · Sep 2, 2004

I will soon be going to be going too university and i will finally have broadband yay no more dialup. I am planning to share the connection in my room between my powermac and powerbook. I may keep the connection open to other users near me so they can use my broadband connection. But i was wondering if there is a unix command or gui tool to see what computers are logged on my network.

Thank you very much

DJY · Sep 2, 2004

You might need to check with you Uni about the airport express...

allegedly one of the students at my Uni plugged his in to his room, which reset / reassigned IPs on the network? or those around him?

I can't say I know about the technical side of all of this - only being very new to ADSL and airport express myself... but apparently now the Uni I work at has banned any additional hardware / routers / wifi.

There is a way around this I heard - but the Uni I am at - didn't want to proceed with it (too much work for them).

emw · Sep 2, 2004

I am assuming by your message that you are simply using the Mac's built in internet sharing service? If not and you have a router with DHCP enabled, you can just look at the router's DHCP clients table to see how many devices are attached.

emw · Sep 2, 2004

DJY said:
You might need to check with you Uni about the airport express...

allegedly one of the students at my Uni plugged his in to his room, which reset / reassigned IPs on the network? or those around him?

I can't say I know about the technical side of all of this - only being very new to ADSL and airport express myself... but apparently now the Uni I work at has banned any additional hardware / routers / wifi.

There is a way around this I heard - but the Uni I am at - didn't want to proceed with it (too much work for them).

There is sometimes an issue with Mac Internet Sharing and networks in that the Mac will start to act as the DHCP server for other nodes on the network that should be going to the main server. As a result, those systems are routed through the Mac (or simply don't get an address), and nobody is happy. Another reason for using a router - it appears just like any other PC on the network, but will provide DHCP services on your internal LAN without impacting the WAN.

boomtopper · Sep 2, 2004

I am not much of a network buff but when i connect the router to the ethernet connection i will be bridging the network right. I was wondering will i have to configure the subnet to make sure i still get internet access?
I guess i will have to do this becuase my wireless lan will be another separate network attached to the WAN.

I have heard the airport extreme has problems configuring its subnet somewhere on the internet.

boomtopper · Sep 2, 2004

emw said:
I am assuming by your message that you are simply using the Mac's built in internet sharing service? If not and you have a router with DHCP enabled, you can just look at the router's DHCP clients table to see how many devices are attached.

At the moment my home connection is using DHCP but i was wondering how do i look up this table then? Is it in the Airport admin Utility?

emw · Sep 2, 2004

boomtopper said:
I am not much of a network buff but when i connect the router to the ethernet connection i will be bridging the network right. I was wondering will i have to configure the subnet to make sure i still get internet access?
I guess i will have to do this becuase my wireless lan will be another separate network attached to the WAN.

I have heard the airport extreme has problems configuring its subnet somewhere on the internet.

Okay, I'm a little confused. What exactly do you have in terms of hardware? It now sounds like you have a cable modem, and two Macs with airport cards - is this correct? And you are considering purchasing a router?

If so, you could:

1) Get a wireless router. Set it up to distribute IP via DHCP and you wouldn't need to set up any subnets - just let your devices connect. A good one is the Linksys WRT54G. You can subnet if you'd like, but it's probably not necessary. You can view the DHCP client table here.

2) Get a wired router and share your connection via one of your Macs. This is less stable (the share goes away when the Mac sleeps) and there is no DHCP client lookup, although someone may know a terminal hack.

If you do have a router, what do you have?

boomtopper · Sep 3, 2004

well at the moment i am still living at home and i have my airport extreme router dialing up to the internet with 2 macs accessing it. The ip address's are assigned via DHCP.
When i move to my university i believe each of the rooms have a connection to the network with a ethernet port. What i want to do is when i move up there connect my network to the university network via the ethernet port of my router. And i was wondering if there is a way i could see if there is a way i can see users on my network when i am at university. And also if i i have configure the subnet.

boomtopper · Sep 3, 2004

emw said:
Okay, I'm a little confused. What exactly do you have in terms of hardware? It now sounds like you have a cable modem, and two Macs with airport cards - is this correct? And you are considering purchasing a router?

If so, you could:

1) Get a wireless router. Set it up to distribute IP via DHCP and you wouldn't need to set up any subnets - just let your devices connect. A good one is the Linksys WRT54G. You can subnet if you'd like, but it's probably not necessary. You can view the DHCP client table here.

2) Get a wired router and share your connection via one of your Macs. This is less stable (the share goes away when the Mac sleeps) and there is no DHCP client lookup, although someone may know a terminal hack.

If you do have a router, what do you have?

With the second choice could i set by having say my powermac connected directly to the university network. This powermac is then wirelessly connected to my airport extreme hub where my powerbook could then use this connection as well.
If this is true how do i set this up?
How do i figure out a static IP?

emw · Sep 3, 2004

boomtopper said:
With the second choice could i set by having say my powermac connected directly to the university network. This powermac is then wirelessly connected to my airport extreme hub where my powerbook could then use this connection as well.
If this is true how do i set this up?
How do i figure out a static IP?

If you already have the Airport Extreme Base Station, hook it into your Ethernet connection. Set it up to share it's IP address via DHCP. It will likely have an IP address something like 192.168.x.x, and will share IP addresses in the range of 10.0.x.x. Both your Powermac and the Powerbook can access the network wirelessly through the base station. There is no reason to hook one of your Macs to the ethernet network directly, as that will just make the whole thing more problematic.

So, it looks like this:

Ethernet
|
(direct)
|
Airport Extreme Base Station - - (wireless) - - Powerbook
|
|
(wireless)
|
|
Powermac

I just don't know how to answer you original question about determining other users on your Extreme Base Station, as I don't have a Base Station to connect to right now and look at the Admin Utility.

boomtopper · Sep 3, 2004

I thought i would have to do it like this. But doing it like this will it cause problems with the university network like you said. I also saw on the internet turning off distribute IP might stop this problem?

Crikey · Sep 3, 2004

To avoid the problem of having your AirPort Extreme Base Station handing out DHCP leases to other people's computers on the LAN, just make sure you plug the correct Ethernet port on the AirPort Extreme Base Station into the Ethernet wall jack. I believe the AirPort Extreme Base Station has two Ethernet ports, one for connecting to the "outside world" (cable or DSL modem, or in your case University Ethernet network) and one for connecting to the "LAN" or any wired computers you might have. The AEBS hands out DHCP leases on the LAN port, so make sure that one doesn't get plugged into the wall.

Cheers,

Crikey

boomtopper · Sep 3, 2004

I have done some research on the network at university I will soon be on and have discovered that it uses DHCP to give each computer a IP address. Would my router need to be given a static IP by one of the administrators?
And then my router would assign all the computers connected to the router with an IP?

Or does my router get given an IP address by the University DHCP?

Thank you so much everyone for your replies you have all helped me learn a lot about networking these past couple of days!

jeremy.king · Sep 3, 2004

boomtopper said:
I have done some research on the network at university I will soon be on and have discovered that it uses DHCP to give each computer a IP address. Would my router need to be given a static IP by one of the administrators?
And then my router would assign all the computers connected to the router with an IP?

Or does my router get given an IP address by the University DHCP?

Thank you so much everyone for your replies you have all helped me learn a lot about networking these past couple of days!

Your router acts like a network client, meaning its going to pick up an IP (using DHCP, if configured that way) from your schools network. When you connect your computers to the router, the router gives those computers an IP - which looks nothing like the IP assigned to the router - using DHCP (usually called internal or local IP) which is usually in the range 192.168.x.x - this is so both those machines can "see" each other for things like sharing files, and music.

Then when you access the internet using either computer, the outside world with only see the IP of your router - NOT the local IP address of your computer

You can also configure your machines with local IPs, but thats a pain in the arse, since you now have to manage IPs and it doesn't sound like you are ready for this...yet

So a modified version of the diagram earlier with made up IPs is as follows

Ethernet
|
(direct)
|
Airport Extreme Base Station (123.45.67.89) - - (wireless) - - Powerbook (192.168.1.100)
|
|
(wireless)
|
|
Powermac (192.168.1.101)

So No you don't need a static IP for you router to work, if its DHCP, you are still okay.

Finally, if you want to share files, music, run an ftp server or lan game server - you may have to setup port forwarding such that the router knows which computer to send that traffic to.

Make sense?

boomtopper · Sep 4, 2004

kingjr3 said:
Your router acts like a network client, meaning its going to pick up an IP (using DHCP, if configured that way) from your schools network. When you connect your computers to the router, the router gives those computers an IP - which looks nothing like the IP assigned to the router - using DHCP (usually called internal or local IP) which is usually in the range 192.168.x.x - this is so both those machines can "see" each other for things like sharing files, and music.

Then when you access the internet using either computer, the outside world with only see the IP of your router - NOT the local IP address of your computer

You can also configure your machines with local IPs, but thats a pain in the arse, since you now have to manage IPs and it doesn't sound like you are ready for this...yet

So a modified version of the diagram earlier with made up IPs is as follows

Ethernet
|
(direct)
|
Airport Extreme Base Station (123.45.67.89) - - (wireless) - - Powerbook (192.168.1.100)
|
|
(wireless)
|
|
Powermac (192.168.1.101)

So No you don't need a static IP for you router to work, if its DHCP, you are still okay.

Finally, if you want to share files, music, run an ftp server or lan game server - you may have to setup port forwarding such that the router knows which computer to send that traffic to.

Make sense?

So when i connect the router to the ethernet the university network will assign my router a IP address.
If this happens do i need my router to assign IP address's to my computers or will the university network just follow through the router and give my computers IP address's?
Also should i have distribute IP?

redAPPLE · Sep 4, 2004

this thread is confusing me. but maybe i could add my 2 cents.

first of all, i think you need to ask the university if what u plan to do is ok. using their network bandwidth for several private computers.

/the university gives you a leased ip address (per dhcp)

/the ip address you will get will be connected to your router and the router should distribute a private ip to your 2 computers (and eventually to other people's computers right?)

/in the airport admin utility you could assign private ip address' (using dhcp and nats). you can also control how many computers would get private ip address' from your wireless router.

/let us say, you plan to give 5 computers the chance to use your router. tell the airport admin utility that you want to share the private ip addrress' 10.0.1.1 until 10.0.1.6.

/in the finder:network you should see the number of computers connected to your private network.

boomtopper · Sep 4, 2004

redAPPLE said:
this thread is confusing me. but maybe i could add my 2 cents.

first of all, i think you need to ask the university if what u plan to do is ok. using their network bandwidth for several private computers.

/the university gives you a leased ip address (per dhcp)

/the ip address you will get will be connected to your router and the router should distribute a private ip to your 2 computers (and eventually to other people's computers right?)

/in the airport admin utility you could assign private ip address' (using dhcp and nats). you can also control how many computers would get private ip address' from your wireless router.

/let us say, you plan to give 5 computers the chance to use your router. tell the airport admin utility that you want to share the private ip addrress' 10.0.1.1 until 10.0.1.6.

/in the finder:network you should see the number of computers connected to your private network.

This is exactly how i thought it would have to work.
But i wonder if the university network will DHCP an IP address for my router and also for my computers that will be wirelessly connected. But i guess if this happens i will have to turn off distribute IP.

redAPPLE · Sep 5, 2004

to be sure, ask the university first. if you need more help. i guess, we here in mac rumors could help out.

good luck.

emw · Sep 5, 2004

boomtopper said:
This is exactly how i thought it would have to work.
But i wonder if the university network will DHCP an IP address for my router and also for my computers that will be wirelessly connected. But i guess if this happens i will have to turn off distribute IP.

Your university will only distribute an IP address to your router. There is really no way for the university network to know you have computers connected wirelessly to your router unless you tell them (which you should) - your router will distribute private IP addresses inside your own personal LAN.

It's like this - say you live in an apartment with 3 buddies. As far as the Post Office is concerned, you all have the same address - everything arrives to a single mailbox. Once you go to the mailbox and get the letters, then you (who in this case are acting as the router) will distribute the letters to the appropriate rooms of the individuals living there.

Now, the Post Office may know there are multiple people living there (and agin, you should probably tell your Uni that you are sharing the single IP amongst several computers), but it has no ability to send mail directly to the appropriate rooms. That's your job as the "mail router."

boomtopper · Sep 5, 2004

Thank you everyone who has replied you have helped me so much and i have learned a lot about networking. I will tell you how i set it up in 2 weeks time and any troubles i may have if any?

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