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Airport Express in Hotel Room - Is this normal?

VirtualRain

VirtualRain

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 1, 2008
6,304
118
Vancouver, BC
Hi,

I've got a strange issue with my AE and wondering if it's the AE or the hotel setup that's causing this.

I can only seem to run the AE in "Bridged Mode" such that each connected device gets and IP from the hotel router. If I try to use NAT, I can't get to the internet. Is this normal? Is there something in Hotel routers that prevents NAT from working in the rooms?

Next, given Bridged Mode is the only mode I can get working... I can only get 2 IP addresses. I have three devices in my room but once two of them connect, I can't get an IP for the third. Is it possible the hotel router is only giving out 2 IP addresses per room?

Thanks for any insights you can provide.
 
Sounds normal to me. The hotel probably has a limit on IPs for each room, and since you are hooking an AE into another network, it would be bridged.
 
NAT stands for network address translation....meaning its taking your private ip 192.168.1.x or 172.x.x.x or 10.x.x.x and translating your private ip to your public ip. which is the reason NAT is not working, you have no connection like mentioned above your using your hotels connection and thus their router. which is why your router is running in bridged mode.
 
Easy.

You can access internet via a Mac laptop, share it to ethernet, and use the airport to serve the signal to other devices.
 
Consultant said:
Easy.

You can access internet via a Mac laptop, share it to ethernet, and use the airport to serve the signal to other devices.
Click to expand...
Or do in reverse which is even easier.

Connect the laptop to the hotel LAN cable.

Then share your laptop's LAN connection with your laptop's Airport. The other devices can then connect to your laptop's Airport connection.

Don't even need an AE this way. :)
 
fsckminix6 said:
NAT stands for network address translation....meaning its taking your private ip 192.168.1.x or 172.x.x.x or 10.x.x.x and translating your private ip to your public ip. which is the reason NAT is not working, you have no connection like mentioned above your using your hotels connection and thus their router. which is why your router is running in bridged mode.
Click to expand...
NAT can also work when you're on a router that's on a private network, like a hotel.

My neighbor' DSL service gives her a "public IP" of 192.168.0.1 ... not so public, and obviously on the private side of their network.

Initially this caused a problem because her D-Link router was setup to use 192.168.0.x for internal, private IP addresses. Needless to say, it's hard to route when external IP addresses are on the same subnet as the internal ones. So we just changed her internal IP address range to 192.168.10.x, and NAT works fine.
 
Le Big Mac said:
. . . at which point your laptop becomes tethered to the desk. Joy!
Click to expand...
Not any worse than having your laptop connected via LAN cable to your AE along with power cord.

At least this way you don't have to carry the AE and the other two devices can connect via WiFi.

The best way would be to plug in the AE to the LAN cable, then provide WiFi to the three devices.
 
aristobrat said:
NAT can also work when you're on a router that's on a private network, like a hotel.

My neighbor' DSL service gives her a "public IP" of 192.168.0.1 ... not so public, and obviously on the private side of their network.

Initially this caused a problem because her D-Link router was setup to use 192.168.0.x for internal, private IP addresses. Needless to say, it's hard to route when external IP addresses are on the same subnet as the internal ones. So we just changed her internal IP address range to 192.168.10.x, and NAT works fine.
Click to expand...

This is how I was expecting it to work... Like a NAT within a NAT... the hotel's router supplies addresses in the range of 63.116.115.x but I can't get a 10.x.x.x NAT network to work on it. :mad:

EDIT: could the problem be related to how the hotel router needs you to confirm you want to pay for the internet connection from each device I connect?... Since the router can't do this on it's own (no user interface), the network connection never actually gets established? But if I use it in bridged mode I can open a browser on each device to accept the charges thus enabling the connection? If so, Bridged will be the only solution and it's the IP limit of 2 addresses per room that's causing me grief.
 
I work in Tech Support for an ISP, and when we replaced our modems/routers with new ones, we ran into this problem for some customers. The problem is basically that your AE and one of the routers the Hotel uses, use the same address. So while you do have a valid private network, the traffic being sent and received is either being delverted to the other router, or not going out at all. You will want to try a different IP combination in your AE's setup. Usually sticking with the 10.0.x.x numbers is safe, but you may want to use a high number for the 3rd octet, for example, make it 10.0.250.x, as you will find it rare for a system to be set for anything other than 0,1,2,3,4, or 5, but some go as high as 200.

TEG
 
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