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OS X Broadband and the Airport Base Station Depending on what you aim to do, placing an Airport Base Station between your OS X Mac and your Internet broadband connection can be real easy or real hard.  But it was Alan Kay who said "Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible". This has been the philosophy underlying the design of the Mac, which we'll soon see in action. by: Bernard Teo 
Back to weblog: Copyright © 2003
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OS X, Broadband, and the Airport Base Station Starting Point This is how you start - with the broadband modem, (1) connected to the wall plate via the telephone wire, and (2) connected to the Mac via Ethernet.
Use this set-up to make sure you really can connect to the Internet via your broadband supplier before you proceed any further. This way, you'll know that any problem you'll have later on will not be due your modem, nor your telephone connection, but something you add from this point on. Adding a Base Station is Easy You will need an Airport Base Station (Extreme or otherwise). Instead of connecting the Ethernet cable (in Step 2) to the back of your Mac, you'll connect it to the Airport Base Station's WAN port.
Step 1. Setting Up the Airport Base Station The following picture shows how you set up the Airport Base Station with the User-ID and password given by your ISP (by using the Airport Admin Utility application in the Utilities folder). You will get this panel when you choose "Connect using PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE)". Use the "Change Password" button to enter your password.
Note that the "Always stay connected" option is checked. That's what you will want your Airport Base Station to do. Next, you should not need to do anything on the following panel. It should look like this :
Finally, just click the "Update" button to restart your Airport Base Station. In a few seconds your Base Station will restart and settle down and it's time for you to test out your wireless connection with an Airport-card-equipped Mac or PowerBook. Step 2. Connecting Airport Card-equipped Macs to the Airport Network Use any Mac or PowerBook with an Airport-card-equipped Mac or PowerBook. The following picture shows what you should set on their Network Preferences : The important thing is to choose the DHCP option for TCP/IP for the Airport Network. At this point, you have not yet connected to the Airport Network, so you shouldn't see any numbers for the IP addresses, as yet.
To connect to the Airport Network, use the Airport menu on the OS X menu-bar. I call my Airport Network "Fairport" and that's what I should choose on the Airport menu.
That's it. Any Mac that connects to the Airport network will now also be able get out to the Internet. Adding a Server to the Base Station may be quite a bit harder You can go one step further, and set up a server behind the Airport Base Station. Look at the picture below. You will need to add a fourth connection - an Ethernet cable between your server's Ethernet port and the LAN port of the Airport Base Station.
Step 1. Give your Server a Static IP Address You need to give your server an IP address manually. The Airport Base Station dishes out IP addresses between the range 10.0.1.2 to 10.0.1.200. The Airport Base Station itself is on 10.0.1.1. So give your server an IP address like 10.0.1.201 (recommended).
Notice that, in the "DNS Servers" box, you'll need to give your server (1) its own IP address, and (2) the IP addresses of some DNS servers it can connect to. I've included the IP addresses of Starhub and Singnet DNS servers. The services you can run on the server include web, mail, ftp, etc. (refer to the articles that will show how to use a dynamic domain name, and how to set up a mail server). If you elect to put up the built-in OS X firewall on your server, you will need to know how to selectively open up the web, mail, ftp and DNS ports; otherwise, your server is effectively deaf - it can't hear those in-coming requests. Step 2. Set up Port Mapping on your Base Station You need to make one change to your Base Station so that requests for services coming in from anywhere on the web can be led to your server. The following picture shows what you have to set, using the Port Mapping tab in the Airport Admin Utility application :
The numbers 21 to 8080 are the well-known ports. 21 is for ftp. 22 is for ssh (remote login) to allow you to administer your server from outside the Airport Network. 25 is for smtp, 110 is for pop, and 80, 143, 8080 are for the web server. For convenience, I have a text file containing the port mappings shown above that you can download. Use the "Import" button to save yourself some typing. When you are ready, click Update to restart your base station. At this point, there are still one or two more things you have to do : Step 3. Run a DNS service on your server You may need to run DNS services on your server so that machines on the local Airport Network can access your server using its domain name. This happens when you're using the old Airport Base Station or some broadband routers that include their own DNS Server but which are a pain to set up. I've created something called DNS Enabler to make it easier to set up a DNS service for the local machines to find their server via domain name.
Step 4. If you've needed to do Step 3, the next step is to update the Network Preferences of all the machines on the Airport Network to use the DNS service on your server You can do this in two ways. Either manually, by updating every machine's Network Preferences (sometimes only this will work) :
Or by updating the Airport Base Station using the Airport Admin Utility, so that it will point every machine on the Airport Network towards this DNS service automatically :
If you take this latter step, restart the Airport Base Station. That's it. You can now run web and mail services (plus any other thing you can think off) off your server. These serve the users on your local Airport Network, and they're also accessible by any machine outside your network. Caution : if you ever need to change your configuration so that you're running without a server, you'll need to take off the Port Mapping on your base station. Sometimes, you'll need to do more than just restart the base station. You may need to switch the power off the base station so that it can clear its memory of all that port mapping. Otherwise it'll eventually freeze up and you will find your machines all stop being able to surf the net. This is equal part superstition and experience. Conclusion You've become your own Information Services Provider. As a by product, you may even find that the surfing experience of your users on your local Airport Network has become perkier, simply because they are able resolve domain name look-ups that much quicker accessing your local DNS service than by going out to SingNet or PacNet's DNS servers. Hope all these have been useful... . |
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Contact : Bernard Teo |
