Airport Express used as a Wireless Bridge?

[estochin]

I am wondering...
Up-stairs I have a LinkSys wireless N Router.
Downstairs I have a 20" iMac that dose not get a very good wireless signal from the router.

Can I plug in an Airport Express downstairs and connect it to my iMac with an eithernet cable and have the Airport Express "talk" to the router upstairs and act as a wireless bridge?

Thanks in advance!

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

No, the Ethernet port on the Experss is only for connecting a wired connection from a modem or wired network. You could, however, setup the Expess as a wireless bridge, or network extender, and still connect to the Internet wirelessly on the iMac. You just need to set the Express up somewhere between the iMac and you main router. You will have to look at the instructions from linksys on setting up a bridge or extender. It should be pretty easy to do.

 

[skorpien]

From what I've read, this is only possible in WDS mode, and that Apple routers don't play nice with non-Apple routers in WDS mode. I'm not sure if this will help, but I ran into this Apple Discussion thread that tries to address a similar situation:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7672904

Also, question 2 on this page says that it is possible:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1515
But from other people's experience, it seems to work best (if at all) with other Apple routers.

 

[estochin]

Thanks guys... I'll look into it.

 

[Mr Kram]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

No, the Ethernet port on the Experss is only for connecting a wired connection from a modem or wired network.

i don't think this is true. i have my slingbox plugged into the ethernet port of an express and it works fine.

 

[gwerhart0800]

Google for ProxySTA mode ...

I am wondering...
Up-stairs I have a LinkSys wireless N Router.
Downstairs I have a 20" iMac that dose not get a very good wireless signal from the router.

Can I plug in an Airport Express downstairs and connect it to my iMac with an eithernet cable and have the Airport Express "talk" to the router upstairs and act as a wireless bridge?

Thanks in advance!

I have an airport extreme in the basement and use an airport express in my upstairs office. The express is set up to bridge the wireless to a wired hub that then connects a Dell laptop, Mac Mini, Mac Book Pro and HP 2600n laser printer to my network.

This only works with the newer "n" Airport Express version running the 7.3.2+ firmware.

 

[waw74]

like gwerhart said it's only the newer (since march 08) N version that can do this.

just set it up to join the existing network (and only join, WDS (extending) with non apple bases get a bit squirrely), then check "allow ethernet clients"

Unless the express will be physically closer to the linksys, you may not see much improvement.


another option is to wire the express to the linksys, and place it somewhere closer to the imac.

another option would be to get a USB wireless adapter and a usb extension cable. which would get you "closer" just like an express on an ethernet cable.