On Friday, July 30, 2004, at 08:33AM, Marcin Wichary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Personally, I think the Airport base station is the best deal going >> because it has ports for non-wireless machines, AOL compatibility (not >> every router has this, believe it or not), Appletalk compatibility and >> a spare USB port for wireless printer sharing, but having said that if >> you just need a wireless router, there are others and they are >> generally cheaper. > >Personally, I found AirPort lacking in two areas: >- no ability to change physical MAC address (this can be useful in some >cases), This would not be feasible as the 'roam on - roam off' nature of 802.11 means you could theoretically be creating a MAC conflict by not sticking to the original MAC address. What sort of situations does this becoe useful in anyway? I have always accepted MAC addresses as 'defacto' and tha tthey should never be changed as they are never likely to conflict. >- "strange" DHCP implementation -- right now my Base Station just won't >get its address from the DSL modem and is effectively useless as a >router; I have one computer in between, but it's much less elegant than >it should be, and defies the whole purpose of having a Base Station in >the first place. From what I've read, it's true with more people. As a rule I *always* statically assign my 'cornerstone' devices (ISDN router, Mac Server and 802.11 AP) a set IP address manually that ends in something that is the egining of a sequence My Mac server, that routes to my segment of the network (I have to do this in order to have a totally flexilbe 'sateful' firewall) is 192.168.50.1 and all machines after it are 50.2, 50.3 etc. My Wireless AP is on that network segment as '192.168.50.100' and all devices attached to the are assigned IPs from 50.101 onwards using it's onboard DHCP. That way I know what is where. I do not assign any cornerstone IPs by DHCP becuase of the Dynamic nature. I have recently had issues with non-pickup of DHCP address on my server also (running OS X 10.3.4) so I set it to the address it should be assigned to manually. Much as I think DHCP is cool and really handy to have, it is by no means fool proof and if you absolutely have to have that machine working all the time (as your base station is) then it's possibly best avoided in my own experience. YMMV -- Mark Benson http://homepage.mac.com/markbenson -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
