Apple Airport Extreme (and Express) wireless base stations support WPA encryption, and also WDS, which allows you to use multiple access points to create one big wireless network (so you don’t actually have to connect each access point to the same “backbone” network, as they will create wireless links between each other).
In this day and age, you’d be silly to use anything less than WPA encryption (WEP is fundamentally flawed), but there are a few caveats with setting up WPA and WDS together on Apple’s devices that I ran into while setting this up for someone recently.
- WPA only works with Airport Express or Extreme access points. (It does not work with the original Airports, or the “snow” models.)
- Upgrade your access points to the latest firmware, some earlier versions have a bug that prevents WPA and WDS from working together.
- Your wireless network name (SSID) must be the same on all access points participating in WDS. (This doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere, and without WPA, you can use different SSIDs.)
Tags: Apple Hardware, Networking, WDS, WEP, Wireless Networking, WPA