aaron-kelley.net » Networking http://aaron-kelley.net My little corner of the Internet Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:57:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 WDS and WPA with Apple Airport Extreme http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/2008/04/wds-and-wpa-with-apple-airport-extreme/ http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/2008/04/wds-and-wpa-with-apple-airport-extreme/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:27:53 +0000 Aaron http://aaron-kelley.net/?p=30 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.)
]]> http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/2008/04/wds-and-wpa-with-apple-airport-extreme/feed/ 0 Vista Internet Connection Sharing Breaks the Network http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/2007/08/vista-internet-connection-sharing-breaks-the-network/ http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/2007/08/vista-internet-connection-sharing-breaks-the-network/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 23:50:34 +0000 Aaron http://aaron-kelley.net/?p=71 I can into a problem today that was actually reported to me last spring by my friend Carl. The problem is, using Windows Vista, with Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) enabled, after running for a while, the Internet connection goes dead.

Actually, the whole network connection seems to be dead. However, it’s obviously not an Internet outage, because existing connections remain open (i.e., I was still able to chat on AIM). Also, pinging and DNS lookups work, but opening up new TCP connections seems to be impossible. At first, there seems to be no way to fix it except to reboot the machine, but after reading for a while, I see that restarting the Internet Connection Sharing service will also fix it. (So will just disabling ICS.)

I did a bit of searching and found several posts on various forums where people were posting about the same problem. It seems to be a pretty glaring bug in Vista ICS. I didn’t encounter it until now because I only turned on ICS a couple of days ago. I’m not sure why the real solution is not very easy to find, but after digging through all of these forums, this particular thread lead me to the answer. Here it is (Microsoft KB article). At least, I hope that’s it, I haven’t encountered the network anomaly since I installed that hotfix.

Note that this is one of those hotfixes that you must request the update from Microsoft, it is not publicly available. Because of the frustrating nature of this bug, I am going to post links that I found earlier to download the hotfix. These may not work, they are only valid as of the time of this writing. Here’s one for the 32-bit version and one for the 64-bit version. You can also use this form to request the hotfix directly.

I hope this helps someone!

(Note: Since a hotfix is already available, I expect that this issue will be resolved in Vista SP1.)

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