Airport Express Question

[Fainer]

I am a noob with this so excuse my ignorance and I appreciate your help very much!

I am temporarily staying at my grandparents house for a few months. They have wired internet, but not wireless. I have an old Apple Airport Express base station that I used for internet just yesterday when I moved out. His only wired cat5 line is plugged directly into his laptop for internet access.

1. If I remove that line from his laptop, plug it into the Airport Epress, and plug that into the wall, will wireless become instantly avaliable or will it require some setup?

2. The bigger question, when I want to return everything to the previous setup when I leave, can I just plug the cat5 back into the laptop as before and be good to go? Or will setup be required?

Thanks for any help!

(He has a HP Pavilion dv6000 laptop).

 

[skorpien]

It requires very little setup. All that's required is for you to turn DHCP off on the Express by setting Connection Sharing to Off (Bridge mode) in AirPort Utility. That allows any of your devices connected to the Express to communicate with any wired devices on his network. It's not absolutely necessary to do this, but you will get a double NAT error if you just plug your Express in without turning DHCP off as both his router and the Express will be acting as DHCP servers.

When you're done, you can just plug the Ethernet back into the laptop and everything will return to how it was. You'll need to enable DHCP on your Express if you want to use it as a router at a later date however.

 

[drsox]

Does your gramps have a router or do they have just one device connected to the internet ? Routers are usually used to allow more than one device to use one internet connection (among other stuff).

 

[lexvo]

I do this all the time when I'm in a hotel with wired internet but no WiFi.

From the top of my head:
- plug the cat cable in the Express
- press the small reset button of the Express, plug it in the wall (power) and release the reset button. This does a factory reset of the Express and my experience is that it helps
- wait a minute or so to allow the Express to start up
- on you iPhone, under Settings-Wifi you should see the Airport Express now. If I remember correctly, the default settings are the ones you want. Enter a password for the wireless network you just created and you're set

 

[Fainer]

Thanks everyone. I simply plugged the cat5 into the Airport, plugged it in the wall, and done! All devices saw it and I'm back online! Of course the PC didn't do things automatically, but I manually got it up and going.

Thanks!