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Problem Solved - Thanks, guys

themightyspitz

themightyspitz

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 16, 2007
134
0
Baltimore, MD
I just got internet today and a new Airport Extreme Base Station. I'm using an old Dell with XP (SP2 installed), and have connected before to my old Airport Extreme Base Station at home. So I fired up the Airport Utility, but it said it couldn't find any Apple wireless devices. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Airport utility, rebooting the base station, unplugging and rebooting the base station....nothing gets it to connect. I'm online now through a hard wire ethernet, but I need to get this Airport up and running.

Any help? I'm about to rip all my hair out.
 
mkrishnan said:
Hmmm.... the AEBS has a hard reset button somewhere in the back, I believe (I have the previous AEBS, but I'm pretty sure the new 802.11n one has it too). It should be a little pinhole type where you have to put a pin or paperclip in the hole and push the button in with the pin. You might try reseting it with that:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1655281&tstart=0
Click to expand...

Tried that, and connected to the AEBS through one of the LAN ports and managed to configure it. However, it still showed an error saying that the Airport could not be assigned an internet address and thus could not connect. So I did manage to get the blinking yellow light away, but it didn't serve me any good since I could not connect to the Internet either through the LAN or through Wireless. I'm hard-lining my computer via Ethernet back into the modem for now.

So I've hard reset it again through the back, and we're back to square one.
 
So you did manage to get it to show up in Airport Utility eventually? But you couldn't get the internet to work?
 
Kilamite said:
So you did manage to get it to show up in Airport Utility eventually? But you couldn't get the internet to work?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I managed to get it to show up in the Utility after connecting to one of its LAN ports. But once I configured it, I couldn't get the internet to work...said it couldn't get the address, or something of the like, and asked me to check if the modem was properly plugged in and connected properly via Ethernet to the AEBS, and it was. But it couldn't get anything over the LAN ports or via the Wireless.
 
Airport Utility can't find Airport Extreme Base Station

I had exactly the same problem a while back and it transpired that I had an old version of Airport Utility. What version do you have?
 
themightyspitz said:
So I did manage to get the blinking yellow light away, but it didn't serve me any good since I could not connect to the Internet either through the LAN or through Wireless. I'm hard-lining my computer via Ethernet back into the modem for now.
Click to expand...

Now this is the annoying advice that cable companies always give you, but in this situation I think it's actually also correct advice...

Unplug the modem from power and from the computer/router. Unplug the router from power also and from anything in the WAN port.

Wait one minute. Turn on the modem first, with no computer connected, and let it go through its power cycle until all the lights come on or whatever.

Wait one minute. Then plug the router into the modem and the wall power and spin it up.

It should pretty much configure itself. The two problems are probably unrelated and coincidental -- what was causing the Win box to not see the router probably has nothing to do with what is causing the router to not get an IP address from the modem.
 
As mkrishnan said - you will actually have to unplug and plug your modem back in, then plug it into your router.

I forgot to mention that - I had to go through the same thing after switching routers.
 
mkrishnan, Kilamite, that did the trick. Turning the modem on and off reset it, and while I did have to configure it via a LAN port, it still worked and can now get it the wireless signal perfectly.

Thanks for all your help, guys!

</thread>
 
No prob... I can't give you a full explanation of why that works, but in essence, what happened as I understand it is that your modem auto-detected your computer and configured itself to work with it. When you plug something else in, it still assumes it will be your computer, and it doesn't manage to reconfigure itself. Unplugging and replugging everything in sequence forces both devices to automatically reconfigure themselves, and it eliminates 90% (probably) of configural errors. That's why the people at the cable company always want you to do it, although it annoys me, since by the time I call them, I've already tried that more than once and I'm already in the 10% of cases where it doesn't help. :eek:
 
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