Airport Extreme

Keith emailed that they are unable to connect their IBM laptop to the Apple router which is an Airport Extreme. He dropped off the laptop, but since I don't have the router, it's going to be hard to figure.

I remember Dexter and Gina had the same kind of problem. I called Gina and Dexter returned the call in the evening. Dexter said they had to add the IP address for the laptop. Gina came on and said the encryption had to match and they had to take the laptop to the Apple store to reset the IP address on it (was my interpretation anyway).

I see they have the AirPort Extreme Setup Guide on the internet. And so is the Airport Utility.

OK. We'll see what happens on Monday when I plan to go over.

[4/28] Well I couldn't get it to work. The Apple Utility software couldn't find the Airport. The IBM Connect software (whatever it's called) could find it, but the signal was very weak. I thought the IBM software might have been interfering with Apple software, so I uninstalled it. This cleared up the logon screen problem (the Welcome Screen option was disabled, so you had the classic logon screen where you type the user name and password). But it still didn't work. Then I figured I'd uninstall the Apple software and see if I could logon with the raw Windows interface. But then it couldn't find anything and I noticed the wireless light on the laptop didn't go on. I managed to recover the IBM connect software with System Recovery (luckily, because not all the System Recoveries worked) and the light reappeared. But still no luck connecting. I even tried connecting with the neighbor's routers, some of which had no encryption set. But still no luck.

Finally, we wound up plugging in the laptop into the router with an Ethernet cable (had to visit Radio Shack to buy one). And that worked. With the cable in, the Apple Utility could see the router, but when I pulled out the cable, no dice. So, I'm guessing something's wrong with the wireless card on the laptop, since I wasn't able to connect to anything wireless. And the Mac connects to the Airport fine. Well at least they got both of their computers on the internet now.

(I gotta get me a laptop one of these days, so I can troubleshoot these problems better.)