eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme

The Airport Extremes elegant design is small and unobtrusive, as the three antennae are embedded inside the chassis.

The AirPort includes a three port 10/100 switch (the WAN port doubles as a switch port in bridge mode) as well as a USB port to connect a printer or hard drive to the network.

AirPort Extreme introduces a new configuration utility that is backwards compatible with older Apple wireless equipment.

We already had a DHCP server and router on the network. We also had to go into manual mode to configure AirPorts bridge mode to open up another switch port.

The wizard only opens up the basic security a home user would enable.

The manual configuration mode opens up a wealth of options to configure wireless, disks, logging or printers.

In manual configuration, AirPort Extreme offers a complete array of wireless privacy options including WPA2 with support for a RADIUS server.

We could set up per-client access time restrictions.

We chose not to hide the SSID or to use Interference robustness.

To the left, the client attaches to AirPorts 2.4 GHz network, which only uses a 20 MHz channel. To the right, our network is 5 Ghz-enabled using channel bonding.

We could easily identify and access AirPort-enabled USB disks from the system tray applet.

In the foreground, AirPort correctly identifies our disk and volume. In the background, the AirPort fails to recognize the Windows-formatted disk.

We could set up individual user logins to access AirPorts USB disks.