vamp: dm

Airport Extreme Configuration with SpeedStream 4100 DSL Modem

Posted by Dave Minor Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:44:00 GMT

I installed SBC DSL today and it was infuriatingly harder than it should have been. Several phone calls to tech support ended with them telling me that they could solve my problem, but I’d have to pay for that level of support—$69. I’m not going to pay that much out to some script reader who knows half as much about computers as I do. I just want his script.

Now I have it. and so do you. I was able to figure out the settings after some mildly helpful google searching. Kudos go to my brother Scott who admittedly knows less about technical issues than I do, but was able to help in the googling and the nudging in the right direction. Sometimes even a geek needs some brainstorming to point them in the right direction. on to the details:

BTW, if you stumbled here via a search engine and these settings helped you, please let me know that we “stuck it to the man!”

First, I set up the Speedstream 4100 to my MacBook Pro’s wired ethernet port and ran the installer. It connected to the net just fine. When I then plugged the modem into my Airport Extreme Base Station, it wouldn’t connect. Also, a note on the bottom of the SS 4100 says Advanced Confifuration on http://192.168.0.1/. I couldn’t connect to that address either.

The AE has as it’s default setting to use 192.168.0.1 as it’s LAN IP and use 192.168.0.2 through 191.168.0.200 for DHCP addresses. While still connected to the SS 4100 via ethernet, I turned off my Airport Card so that it would look on the ethernet card for 192.168.0.1 instead of over wifi. Tada! Now I could point my browser at 192.168.0.1 and got the SS 4100 configuration page. Using the access code on the bottom of the modem, I was able to access the Admin -> Connection Configuration page.

Following instructions found here on the topic, I changed the questions “Let LAN device share Internet address?” to No from the default Yes. This forces the modem to hand out LAN side IP addresses via DHCP which I believe the AE needs.

Next, I hooked the AE into the modem and turned my Airport Card back on on the MBP. Using the AirPort Admin Utility, I connected to the AE and told it to use DHCP for Internet. The major problem I was having was that the modem was holding 192.168.0.1 for it’s use, but the AE was also holding 192.168.0.1 as it’s LAN IP. IP conflict! Under the Network tab, I told AirPort client computers to “Share a single IP address” and changed the private Class C to 10.0.1.x. I’m fairly certain that after changing to this C, you can go back to “Share a range of IP addresses”, but I haven’t yet.

After updating the AE, everything started working properly. I’ll need to do some updating of machines and IPs on my LAN to take on the new IP scheme, but that won’t be too hard. I’m fairly positive that I could have left the AE to 192.168.0.x and changed the SS 4100 to use a different IP for admin, but I chose not to muck with the modem any more than I had to. and secretly, I had been wanting to change over to 10.0.x.x anyway.

Please let me know if this information is useful to you. How hard would it be for Yahoo to put out something to this effect??