Airports on my network

[eze]

I have a total of 3 airports attached to a cart with approx. 30 Mac ibooks (white 12") running 10.3.9. I have a OSX server running 10.4.11. When the users attempt to log into the network from the ibooks, it is extremely slow and then not all of the ibooks will connect or they freeze up. The airports are the somewhat older extreme versions. I have upgraded the firmware on the airports to the most current version available. I set them up to share an ip to the ibooks using NAT at first, but am now considering maybe just soley using DHCP if anyone thinks that will help. Anyone else have this problem?? Is there a limit on how many ibooks can connect to the airports? I think that 30 ibooks and 2 airports should be plenty. The problem is also very sporatic and not limited to just certain ibooks. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Any help would be EXTREMELY Apreciated. Thanks.

 

[4np]

I would probably set up the aiports on a wired network and configure them as bridges and let the OS X server deal with DHCP etc. You should remember though that WiFi is half-duplex and if a lot of computers share the same access point and one is fetching some huge files over WiFi from the wired network that this will indeed bring down the overall network speed for other users on the same access point / airport.

I'm not sure how access point roaming would work in this setup though, but you could give it a shot...

 

[DoFoT9]

yes as said above, if you have 30 computers connected they would be equally shared, so they would only get somewhere around 500kbps each (no idea exactly just a rough calculation).

i would check out your server and see what the load on that is like.. make sure CPU usage is at a minimal and that there is plenty or RAM etc.