just checking airport extreme can do this

[ashjamben]

i want airport extreme to connect two hard drives and a printer to, but heres what i'm not sure about.

I live in a shared student house, so in the hallway downstairs i have the cable box and wireless router, which is the only place to put it really.

i want to have the printer and two hard drives set up in my room with the airport extreme connected to the same network, but i want the printer and hard drive only to be accessible (and possibly only seen on the network) by my computer

i know i could have it on a separate network which if i was the only one who knew the network key could access, but it would just be easier if it was on the same one as the internet

thanks for reading

 

[drummerlondonw3]

so you would want to add the AE to your existing network and use this as an access point?

You would also be able to p/w protect I believe but would have to get some other clarification on that

Btw what uni are you going to and what are you studying?

D

 

[ashjamben]

yes thats right, use as an access point and connect to the current (well soon to be 50mb cable ) wifi network

i'm at leeds met, studying music technology. how about yourself (if you're a student)?

 

[Shake 'n' Bake]

I'd just connect what you don't want seen on the network right to your computer.

 

[ashjamben]

a valid point, i'd just like the ease of it, plus it would free up usb ports on my machine. i get fed up of disconnecting stuff every time i want to use my printer, hard drive, audio interface, mouse, flash drive, etc

 

[Shake 'n' Bake]

In that case, I'd try to get a powered USB hub for it. I don't know that you can hide it, but you can probably encrypt or password protect to the HDD. People generally don't print to an unfamiliar printer, from what I've observed.

 

[drummerlondonw3]

if you connect your HDs they will become air disks and these can be p/w protected, similar if you were connecting to a TC

I'm soon to be a student again actually, going to start my Masters in Town PLanning @ UCL in Sept

Best of luck in your course, sounds like it'll be great

 

[ashjamben]

People generally don't print to an unfamiliar printer, from what I've observed.

you're probably right, but when you've got quite a few housemates that would find it funny to print random stuff at 2 in the morning you'd probably disagree haha

 

[JoeG4]

I can't tell you how to do this off the top of my head, especially since I don't own an Apple router, but here's what I'd attempt to do:

1. MAC filter your airport extreme. Put only your computer (and your network devices) on it.

2. Password protect your router. Now only your machine can talk to your router..

3. Keep it in router mode, if your machine and your HDs are behind the NAT, you can just block the ports that would allow people to connect from outside the router.

There are further things you can do to prevent people from accessing it, I imagine.

 

[cmcbridejr]

You can always leave your printer turned off so nobody will print to it. Then, you just turn it on only when you need to print. I am guessing that you do not print a lot of stuff at all times of the day. The warmup for a printer is typically less than a few minutes. This will prevent your buddies printing at 2:00am.

As far as the hard drive, you can set read/write administrative rights. With the Airport, you can even set a password to restrict access to the hard drive. You can also setup up Admin and Guest account access to the Airport.