Access Point Management Software
If you have a Mac handy, you are in
luck. The AirPort Admin utility that ships with the AirPort is
excellent. As with their entire product line, Apple has gone out of
their way to make the whole AirPort system easy to set up, even for
beginners. If you don't own a Mac, you have a couple
of options. It turns out that the innards of the Graphite AirPort are
virtually identical to the Orinoco RG-1000 (previously, the Lucent
Residential Gateway). That means that the RG configuration
utility for Linux (called cliproxy) also works
fine with the AirPort. Unfortunately, as the Lucent product family
has been sold and resold several times in the past couple of years
(the same product line has been called Lucent, Orinoco, Agere, Avaya,
and Proxim, and probably a couple of others that
I've missed), the cliproxy
utility seems to have disappeared from
the Proxim web site. Copies of it are still floating around on
various message boards; it is a tremendously useful utility if you
can find it. Jon Sevy has done extensive work with the
AirPort, and has released an open source Java client that configures
the AirPort (both Graphite and Snow) and
the RG-1000. You can get a copy from http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/sevy/airport/.
He has also compiled a tremendous amount if information on the inner
workings of the AirPort, and has many resources online at this site.
Since his utility is open source, cross-platform, and works very
well, we'll use it in the following examples. Figure 4-1 shows the main screen of the Java
Configurator.
To use the Java Configurator application, you'll
need a copy of the Java Runtime Environment.
Download it from http://java.sun.com/, if you
don't already have it. You can start the utility by
running the following in Linux:
$ java -jar AirportBaseStationConfig.jar &
In Windows, start by double-clicking the AirportBaseStationConfig
icon.
The AirPort can be configured over the Ethernet port or over the
wireless network. When the application window opens, you can click
the Discover Devices button to auto-locate all
of the APs on your network. When you find the IP address of the AP
you want to configure, type it into the Device
address field, then type the password into the
Community name field. If you're
unsure about the IP address or the password, the AirPort ships with a
default password of public, and an IP address of
10.0.1.1 on the wireless interface (it picks up
the wired IP address via DHCP; use Discover
Devices to find it if you're configuring
it over the Ethernet). Once you've entered the
correct information, click the Retrieve Settings
button.
The very first thing you should change is the Community
name, on the first panel. Otherwise, anyone can
reconfigure your AirPort by using the public
default! While you're there, you can set
the name of the AirPort (which shows up in network scans), the
location, and contact information. These fields are entirely
optional, and have no effect on operations.
You should also choose a Network name, under the
Wireless LAN Settings tab. This is also known as
the ESSID, and will identify your network to clients in range. If
you're running a
"closed" network, it needs to be
known ahead of time by any host attempting to connect, as described
in the following section.
Sections
