Airport Base Station and PC's

[Joeytpg]

guys, i have a little question............if i buy an Airport Express or Extreme to hook up my wireless dorm internet would my PC friends (Dell laptop, Toshiba laptop, and Powerbook 15" mine) be able to connect wirelessly too? (all of us using the Airport?)

isn't there a compatibility problem?

 

[James_C]

Provided they have got 802.11b or g wireless capability they should be able to connect fine. One point to note is if you have high speed 802.11g (airport extreme) and they have the slower 802.11b then the whole network will work at the slowest speed that someone is connecting. However if you are just sharing an internet connection then you won't notice the difference as that is likely to be slower than 802.11b anyway.

 

[Westside guy]

Yup, we use both AE's with both Macs and PCs without a problem.

 

[BornAgainMac]

The only difference is that you will use the long encrypted version of the password on the PC. The main Airport screen will show this password.

 

[JOD8FY]

I have an Airport Express and both my Mac and PC can connect wirelessly. However, I can't enable a password on my network. If I do, the PC won't connect. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks,
JOD8FY

 

[James_C]

Can you see the network from the PC. If you can, have you given the PC the correct password ( See BornAgainMac's post). The password is not the same on the PC, as you specified on the Mac. If you fire up the Airport Admin Utility, go into configuration press the button marked password and it will give you the Hex Equivalent Password that you need to use on the PC.

 

[JOD8FY]

Can you see the network from the PC. If you can, have you given the PC the correct password ( See BornAgainMac's post). The password is not the same on the PC, as you specified on the Mac. If you fire up the Airport Admin Utility, go into configuration press the button marked password and it will give you the Hex Equivalent Password that you need to use on the PC.

It's a very strange thing. If I have enabled a password from my Mac, my PC can still connect to the network, but it won't load any web pages. If I open up Airport Admin, Utility, the PC does not see the Base Station. Thanks for the help though.

JOD8FY

 

[MacPCHybrid]

Infuriating problem with PC connection

Guys,

The long and short of it is that I can't do it wirelessly. I migrated from a PC-based 54g network to an Airport Extreme and WDS Airport Express at the weekend and now can't get the PC online wirelessly!?!

I have a powerbook hooked-up to the network fine but my PC-based notebook can't access the WAN (internet I guess). The wireless aspect is correct, the PC is logged onto the AE base station albeit it doesn't pick the base station up in AE utility and the password was set as 64 bit Hex WEP in the first place.

If I connect the LAN cable from the PC to the AE base station everything works perfectly. What is going on? What am I doing wrong? There's little point setting-up a wireless network if you can't secure it.

 

[patrick0brien]

There's little point setting-up a wireless network if you can't secure it.

-MacPCHybrid

My advice would be to drop the WEP completely and use the Access Control feature to filter MAC addresses. Between my two roomates and I we're running a WDS with an AEBS and to Airport Espresses two serve a mixed Mac/PC network of 7 PC's and 2 Macs. Works perfectly - and no breaches (logging)

 

[James_C]

Guys,

The long and short of it is that I can't do it wirelessly. I migrated from a PC-based 54g network to an Airport Extreme and WDS Airport Express at the weekend and now can't get the PC online wirelessly!?!

I have a powerbook hooked-up to the network fine but my PC-based notebook can't access the WAN (internet I guess). The wireless aspect is correct, the PC is logged onto the AE base station albeit it doesn't pick the base station up in AE utility and the password was set as 64 bit Hex WEP in the first place.

If I connect the LAN cable from the PC to the AE base station everything works perfectly. What is going on? What am I doing wrong? There's little point setting-up a wireless network if you can't secure it.

First make sure on your powerbook that in Network preferences under Airport that "this computer can create networks" is turned off. It would help to know how the Airport base station is connected to the Internet. Let me assume until you tell us otherwise that it is via a Router. I suspect the router is set to DHCP, to provide IP address to computers connected with it. In this case you need to go into the Base station configuration, using the utility and click on the network tab and ensure that distribute IP addresses is turned off, so that all the IP address are provided by the router, using DHCP.

Hope that helps, if not please give more details of your network setup.