The Apple AirPort Base Station
The AirPort is a
tremendously popular access point (so popular, in fact, that there
are a number of variations available: AirPort Graphite, AirPort Snow,
and Airport Extreme). It looks like a slick, retro-futuristic prop
from "War of the Worlds," and is
very portable and rugged. While designed for use with the Mac
platform, it works very well as a general-purpose access point (and
you don't even need a Mac to configure it; see the
next section). As I write this, the original Graphite AirPort sells
retail for about $140. What does that get you?
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Direct Ethernet bridging
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DHCP / NAT
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56k dialup modem port
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User-definable ESSID
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Roaming support
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MAC address filtering
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40-bit WEP encryption
The Snow AirPort introduced an additional Ethernet port and more
firewall options, as well as 104-bit WEP and completely redesigned
internals. The new AirPort Extreme (about $199) comes equipped with
all sorts of goodies, including two Ethernet ports, and most
importantly, a draft 802.11g
"Extreme" card. For $50 more, they
throw in a USB port (for sharing a printer) and an external antenna
connector.
All of the APs in the AirPort family have only one radio (an embedded
Orinoco Silver card in the Graphite, an AirPort card in the Snow, and
an "Extreme" mini-PCI card in the
Extreme model). If you are thinking of adding a do-it-yourself
antenna to a Graphite or Snow model, you definitely
aren't the first. Take a look at the following URLs
for details on how to retrofit an antenna onto the Graphite or Snow:
Out of the box, the AirPort will try to get a DHCP lease from a
server somewhere on the Ethernet network, and start serving NAT and
DHCP on the wireless, with no password. Yes, by simply plugging your
new toy into your LAN, you have eliminated all of the hard work that
went into setting up your firewall. Anyone within earshot now has
unrestricted wireless access to the network you plugged it into!
While this could be handy at a conference or for any other
public-access network, the default configurations are probably not
what you want. To change them, you'll need
configuration software. Thankfully, configuration of the various
members of the AirPort family is remarkably similar. For the rest of
this chapter, I'll assume that you are working with
a classic Graphite AirPort.
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