Airport Express crashing my network!

[pcmofo]

I have a very nice and stable home network. It is up 100% of the time with the exception of a full on power or cable outage, no resetting routers, modems etc, plugging and unplugging power cables etc.

I have my own router running on a free BSD OS called PF sense. This thing is rock solid and NOT the cause of any of my issues. It it's job is to be the router/firewall. It does other cool things like auto assigns my MBP the same IP every time so I have correct ports etc open.

My network looks something like this

Cable Modem
-- Router/Firewall
-- -- Switch
-- -- -- Wired Computers
-- -- -- Time Capsule
-- -- -- Airport Express

This setup was working great for over a year when suddenly my network stopped working at all and all computers lost connection. I unplugged and replugged each network cable into the switch, I found that without the Airport express plugged in the network worked fine. Clearly it is the issue.

On my network, I am using a separate router, the Time Capsule's sole purpose is to CREATE the WiFi network but hand off the job of assigning IP's to the router, which works fine. It would appear that as soon as the Airport Express hopps onto the network it wants to be in charge and hand out IP's even though I have reset it multiple times, connected it outside of the network to configure it, and told it NOT to assign IP's

Like I said... this WAS working fine but no longer. I need WiFi in two remote locations, the TC stays in the house and is the main WiFi AP, the Airport Express is the remote wired AP repeater. I need it for both minimal WiFi access and the AirPlay features.

Anyone have some suggestions on how to snap the Airport Express back into shape?

 

[pcmofo]

I have solved my own problem through trial and error....


Apparently I was attempting to have the airport express "Join another network" which was causing the wifi to connect to the TC as a client and turn the ethernet port into an output instead of an input... crashing the network

In order to create multiple nodes with airports that are all wired to ethernet and use them as Access Points only you need to set them to Bridge mode and to Create Wireless Network, then name the wireless network and settings the same name. This will create one network with multiple AP's and your computer will only see one network and you can transition from AP to AP without dropping connection.