eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme

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.

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – AirPorts Ports

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.

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – AirPort Utility

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

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – Wizard Network Services

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.

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – Wizard Security

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

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – Manual Configuration

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

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – AirPort Wireless Security Options

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

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – Beefed-up Wireless MAC Security

We could set up per-client access time restrictions.

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – Advanced Wireless Settings

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

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – 2.4 v. 5 GHz Clients

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.

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – System Tray Resident Applet

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

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – AirPort Recognizes USB Disks

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

eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Apple AirPort Extreme – Different Ways to Access USB Disks

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