Questions regarding extending a network

[dazed]

Hi,

Just bought a time capsule and am trying to use my old AirPort Extreme to extend network.

Everything appears ok in airport utility

Internet _______ time capsule ........ Extreme.


For some strange reason my Mac mini (which is my media server) will only connect to the extender even though it's further away. Is there any way to restrict it to just connecting to the time capsule?

I've tried to restrict its access in the access control section of the extreme but somehow it then won't just reconnect to the time capsule.

Any ideas? The reason I don't want it connecting to the extender is it's much slower and causes hd streaming problems.


Thanks

 

[nebo1ss]

Always best to connect your Media Server wired Ethernet and not WIFI.

 

[dazed]

Always best to connect your Media Server wired Ethernet and not WIFI.

Unfortunately that's not possible at moment. It works perfectly and I can stream HD with no issues, until I introduce the extended network. Then I can't even play a movie.

I've tried access control and I've even tried to turn off the 5ghz wifi on the extender (my media only uses the 5ghz antenna) to force it to connect to the time capsule. Nothing seems to work.

 

[nebo1ss]

Why not set up a 5Ghz network on the Time Capsule with a different name to the rest of the network and then use that to connect the server.

 

[mvmanolov]

OsX has its own way of determining what to connect to. you can force it to connect to an AP by turning off the AP that you don't want it to connect to, this will stay that way until you turn off/restart the AP that it is connected to, at which point it will again connect the first available AP.

I have not been able to find a way to force OsX to connect to an AP that i want it to in any other way as of yet...

 

[Tonsko]

OsX has its own way of determining what to connect to. you can force it to connect to an AP by turning off the AP that you don't want it to connect to, this will stay that way until you turn off/restart the AP that it is connected to, at which point it will again connect the first available AP.

I have not been able to find a way to force OsX to connect to an AP that i want it to in any other way as of yet...

Sorry to resurrect. However, this may help some folk. I have just installed a new AP to extend the wifi to outside. The Mac then chose this new one when I didn't want it to; there is a command you can run in terminal to see which AP it has connected to (look for BSSID):

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -I

So, my problem was to force it to connect to the main AP, as I get better speed than I do from the secondary. There used to be a switch for the airport command in 10.6 and below to force this, but that has since been deprecated.

The solution is to come at it from the other other direction; log into secondary AP and ban the mac's, erm, mac address. It will then reconnect to the one you want it to without having to fiddle around turning the other one off all the time.