Do I really need an Airport device for my home wireless network?

Hi Apple Users,
I am seriously considering purchasing my very first Apple computer: a MacBook Pro to be precise. I'm a very experienced Windows PC user - was a Microsoft Windows & Office -based Help Desk Analyst at my company for 13 years till I was laid off last year. So I know my way around Microsoft Windows computers, Windows LANs, wireless networking & servers, security, etc. I currently own a Dell Precision laptop running Windows 7 - have had it for 3 years with no problems (yet - knock on wood). I have a cable modem with a Motorola SBG900 wireless router / gateway with hardware firewall enabled. Everything is secure, only certain ports are open, etc.
If I buy this MacBook Pro, get it delivered, turn it on, create my logon, etc. will it automatically work with my current wireless router / gateway after going thru the set-up procedure to connect to my network & the internet? Or do I absolutely have to purchase one of the Airport adapters in order for the Mac to talk to the router?
Thank you for being patient with a newbie Apple / Mac User wannabe. I'm very excited!
Kim

Thank you Rysz, but (if you scroll up & read my original post you will discover) I don't own my new MacBook Pro...yet! I'm just researching ahead of time to help me make the decision. The customized MBP I have saved in my cart is over $3000 (incl the 3-yr support plan). So it's going to take me a little bit of research before I decide or before I can really justify the purchase.
I just wanted to be prepared for all the inevitable technical / learning-curve headaches that I will experience IF I take the plunge. And as everyone has experienced, when you're new to and making your first purchase of a different technology, and you don't know what to expect about a purchase, you ultimately get it home, set it up and find it didn't come with all the necessary interface devices, converters or cables, etc. And of course the online purchase procedure wizard doesn't tell you or ask you what else you will need if you want to perform a specific task.
But I'm sure (if) once I do make the purchase, I will definitely be back here to pick everyone's brains! These communities are fantastic. Thanks again!

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New Airport Express - interfering with home wireless network?

I have an IMac and laptop PC both connected to a wireless home network. I plugged in the new Airport Express, and ran a Toslink cable to my home stereo. My intent is to stream music from the IMac.
When I plug in the AExp I get a flashing amber, then the green light, then flashing amber. I asked the AExp to "join" my network. Soon after the first green light the home wireless connection is unavailable to both my IMac and PC laptop. If I unplug the AExp then the laptop PC reconnects to the network. With the AExp unplugged I also must have "Turn On AirPort" on the IMac to have the internet status as "connected".
Basic problem: when I plug in the AExp both home computers disconnect from the home wireless network.
Any suggestions to getting the AExp to work within the home wireless network?

First, perform a "factory default" reset on the 802.11n AirPort Express Base Station (AXn) to get it back to its "out-of-the-box" configuration.
Then take a look at the following steps to be sure that nothing was missed:
AirPort Express Base Station (AX) - iTunes Setup
Either connect to the AX's wireless network or connect directly, using an Ethernet cable, to the Ethernet port of the AX, and then using the AirPort Utility in "Manual Setup" mode, make the following changes:
AirPort Utility > Select the AX > Manual Setup > AirPort > Wireless tab
Wireless Mode: Join a wireless network
Network Name: <existing wireless network name>
Wireless Security: <select the encryption type of the existing wireless network>
Wireless Password: <enter the existing wireless network password>
AirPort Utility > Select the AX > Manual Setup > Music
Enable AirTunes (checked)
iTunes Speaker Name: <enter the desired speaker name>
iTunes Speaker Password: (optional)
Verify Password: (optional)
Click Update to write the new settings ot the AX

Setup Airport Extreme for the home wireless - MacBook Air, Pro, and iPad connect just fine. Wireless will not work to Windows 7 and Vista machines - network seen, tries to connect, but fails after entering WPA key.

Can't get Windows Vista or Windows 7 laptops to access internet via Airport Extreme. Works fine with security on MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iPad. Brand new Airport, bought today. Windows machines worked fine with existing, relatively modern Cisco home router. The Windows machines see the wireless network, prompt for password, and then cannot connect. Have tried all sorts of things with Windows machines, deleted existing networks, etc. even tried guest login with no security on the Airport - no luck. Windows XP machine directly (wire) connected works fine. Magic Jack works OK. Light is green on the front.

Thank you very much for your help @Sunshyn2005!!!!! I think we're good to go now!

Advice for a Home Wireless Network

Hi, I am looking for some guidance on the best way to set up a wireless network in my home. I am not wired for ethernet and my Internet access is through Comcast Cable. The main issue I have is that I must place my wireless router in the basement near the wiring closet because the cable modem is also required to be there (DirecTV provides my TV programming so the coax cable throughout the house is used for that).
Placing the wireless router in the basement works ok for access from the basement or first floor but the signal is very weak from second floor and backyard. I am also limited to using the WRTP54G Wireless Router (Vonage version) for the basement router but if there is anyway to use something else as the main router while just using this as the phone router, I would jump at that since I have found this model to be somewhat unreliable.
Ideally, I would like to take advantage of the increased range and speed of the 802.11n format. I have been reading on here about different ways to link wireless APs together but I'm not totally clear on what equipment is necessary. My main goal is to be able to access the internet from the 2nd floor and also from the backyard, as far as 200 ft away. I can place wireless equipment basically anywhere inside. Cost is important but is a secondary consideration to functionality.
Any suggestions would be most appreciated!!

You can trust WRT610N as it will give you the desired range...

TS1398 Password for my home wireless network

My Linskys is encryped, what is the password to connet to safari?

There's no way anyone here would know that. You would have to consult the documentation for your router or look at the settings in the router.
Regards.

Can I use the Time Capsule strictly for system backup and continue to use my Airport Extreme for all my wireless needs

I want to use the Apple Time Capsule as an external drive and continue to use my Airport Extreme for all my wireless needs. Can I do that? The reason I ask is that my Time Machine utility cannot find the TIme Capsule - it only shows me the Airport Extreme, even when I "Rescan". SO I am unable to use the Time Capsule.

You will need to connect an Ethernet cable from one of the LAN <-> ports on the AirPort Extreme to the WAN "O" port on the Time Capsule.
Perform a "hard reset" on the Time Capsule by holding in the reset button for 9-10 seconds, then give it another minute to restart to a slow, blinking amber light.
Open AirPort Utility, select the Time Capsule, and click Manual Setup
Click the Time Capsule tab located below the row of icons to assign a name to the Time Capsule, a device password, and adjust Time Zone settings.
Next, click the Wireless tab located to the right of the Time Capsule tab
Change the setting for Wireless Mode to Off
Click the Internet icon, then click the Internet Connection tab
Connect Using = Ethernet
Connection Sharing = Off (Bridge Mode)
Click Update at the lower right to save the settings and allow 30 seconds for the Time Capsule to restart to a green light.
You are all set

When do I really need to create indexes for a table?

Once I was talking to a dba in a conference.
He told me that not always I have to create indexes for a single table, it depends of its size.
He said that Oracle read registers in blocks, and for a small table Oracle can read it fully, in a single operation, so in those cases I don't need indexes and statistcs.
So I would like to know how to calculate it.
When do I really need to create indexes for a table?
If someone know any documment that explain that, or have some tips, I'd aprecciate.
Thanks.
P.S.: The version that I'm using is Oracle 9.2.0.4.0.

Hi Vin
You mentioned so many mistakes here, I don't know where to begin ...
vprabhu_2000 wrote:
There are different kinds of Index. B-tree Index is by default. Bit map index, function based index,index organized table.
B-tree index if the table is large This is incorrect. Small tables, even those consisting of rows within just one block, can benefit from an index. There is no table size too small in which an index might not be benefical. William Robertson in his post references links to my blog where I discuss this.
and if you want to retrieve 10 % or less of data then B-tree index is good. This is all wrong as well. A FTS on a (say) million row table could very well be more efficient when retrieving (say) just 1% of data. An index could very well be more efficient when retrieving 100% of data. There's nothing special about 10% and there is no such magic number ...
>
Bit Map Index - On low cardinality columns like Sex for eg which could have values Male,Female create a bit map index. Completely and utterly wrong. A bitmap index might be the perfect type of index, better than a B-Tree, even if there are (say) 100,000 distinct values in the table. That a bitmap index is only suitable for low cardinality columns is just not true. And what if it's an OLTP application, with lot's of concurrent DML on the underlining table, do you really think a bitmap index would be a good idea ?
>
You can also create an Index organized table if there are less rows to be stored so data is stored only once in index and not in table. Not sure what you mean here but an IOT can potentially be useful if you have very large numbers of rows in the table. The number of rows has nothing to do with whether an IOT is suitable or not.
>
Hope this info helps. Considering most of it is wrong, I'm not sure it really helps at all :(
Cheers
Richard Foote
http://richardfoote.wordpress.com/

I have an eMac which I want to connect to my home wireless network. My router is D-Link-601 tech 802.11n. My emac is wireless ready but does not contain an airport card. Do I need a card and an airport station? What else?

I have an eMac which I want to connect to my home wireless network. My router is D-Link - 601 tech. 802.11n. My eMac is wireless ready but does not contain an airport card. Do I need a card and an airport station? What else?

You need the Airport card OR Airport Express but not both. Considering the age of your machine, I recommend Airport Express as you will find other uses for it whenever you replace the eMac.
To set up the AE, you do need OSX 10.4 or higher.

Need to configure Airport connection to access corporate wireless network

Need to configure Airport connection to access corporate wireless network.
Have imported my certificate from Windows XP machine into keychain and made Leopard always trust in order to authenticate automatically into my corporate wireless network. Also attempted to establish a new 802.1x connection via network preferences without any success. It keeps asking me for username and password even though we used self-generated certificates to log into corporate wireless network. Does anybody have any instructions on how to successfully configure certificates in Leopard?

Welcome to the discussion area, jackregan!
You'll need to "hard reset" the Time Capsule and then reconfigure it again. To do this, you will hold in the reset button until you see the amber light begin to blink more quickly, keep holding another second or two and then release.
The "hard reset" will not affect the data on your Time Capsule
Now you can open AirPort Utility and configure the Time Capsule using wireless (be sure to log on to the default network which will have a name like Apple Network xxxxxx), or you can connect an ethernet cable from your computer to one of the LAN <-> ports on the Time Capsule to have AirPort Utility communicate with it that way.
When you open AirPort Utility, click Continue to follow the guided setup to re-configure your Time Capsule. You would choose the option to "Create a wireless network" when you are given the configuration options.

Setup for extending Sky wireless network using Airport Express or Time Cap

Hi,
Hi,
I have three Mac computers/laptops (iMac, MacBook Air and G4 PowerBook), all currently functioning via airport on a sky wireless network (Sky HD Sagem router) all backing up wirelessly to a Time Capsule 1TB which is also connected to the same wireless Sky network. At the top of my house signal strength is weak as you would expect. I would like to be able to extend the range of the sky routers signal which is on the ground floor (3 storey house). My original idea had been to setup a AirPort Express on the 2nd floor to extend the network, but I am unsure what steps I have to follow and whether I need to create a WDS network or not? I've seen some comments that say Sky & Apple hardware are not compatible and it's not possible to extend a Sky router/wireless network using a Apple Airport Express or Time Capsule. Can someone provide me with a step by step set of instructions on what I need to do to set this up? If a work around is required, again any advice would be very much appreciated!
Many thanks,
Eugene

Welcome to the discussions!
Sky and Apple products are not compatible for the purpose of extending your network using wireless only.
If you could connect an ethernet cable from your Sky router to the AirPort Express, or if it's not possible to run an ethernet cable...take a look at a pair of ethernet powerline adapters to accomplish the same task by using the AC wiring in your home to transmit the ethernet signal.
If you configure the AirPort Express to "create a wireless network", this would in effect, extend your network by adding an AirPort Express that would be configured with the exactly the same wireless network name, security settings and password as your Sky router. The AirPort Express would also need to be configured as a "bridge".
Post back if you need more details about something like this.

Hi, I just bought a new Macbook Pro 15" with SSD 256 Gb and its almost a brand new a while ago i was trying to connect to my home wireless network it said that your airport is not configured then I restarted the system but it didn't restart it shows the "

Hi,
I just bought a new Macbook Pro 15" with SSD 256 Gb and its almost a brand-new (the 4th time to use the device) a while ago i was trying to connect to my home wireless network it said that the connection is timed out so i clicked the airport sign on the top it said that your airport is not configured then I restarted the system but it didn't restarted it showed the grey screen with the apple logo and the spinning wheel for more than 10min so I tried the force shutdown by pressing the power button till it switched off I waited for 5min then pressed the power button to start or boot the system and again the grey screen with the apple logo and the spinning wheel, I waited for more than 20min nothing changed, any solution please?
Your help is really appreciated"

Thanks a lot i followed the instructions for safe mode (i found out that i was pressing the C button after restarting) i did whats written there but the repair couldn't be performed so in addition i needed to re-formate the HD so i erased the volume and then repaired the disk--> quite disk utilities --> start the installation from the installation DVD.
Thanks really appreciating your help

Instructions for extending a wireless network through a wired connection

These are the instructions for extending a wireless network by wiring two airports together.
The benefit of this is to provide a strong signal in more locations in your home or business.
The advantage of this technique over WDS is that the wired connection is faster and more reliable.
These instructions assume you have a) an existing wireless network setup using an airport , b) a new airport that you want to add to your network, c) you can run a cat 5 cable between the two airports, and d) you are familiar with the airport utility.
If while using these instructions you are prompted to update your airport firmware please do so.
1) Gather the following information from your existing Airport on the Summary tab of Airport utility:
a) Wireless Network Name
b) Wireless Security
c) You will also need the password, which hopefully you just know.
2) Plug in your new Airport, connect it to the existing Airport using a cat 5 cable.
3) Reset the new Airport using the tip of a paper clip. On my Airport Express that is next to the audio out.
4) After a short wait the new Airport should appear in Airport Utility with a generic name.
5) Click the new airport and click "Manual Setup". You may have to cancel out of some popups to get to the Manual Setup button.
6) On the "Base Station" tab set a "Name" that does NOT equal the the name of your old Aiport. Also set the password. This us the password that one uses to make changes to the setup of the Airport.
7) On the "Wireless" table set a "Wireless Network Name", "Wireless Security", and "Password" to exactly match that of your old Airport. This is the password that one uses to gain access to the network.
8) On the "Internet->Internet Connection" tab set connection sharing to "Off (Bridge Mode)".
9) Click "Update" at bottom right of Airport Utility.
10) Test by using "Advanced->Logging and Stats->Wireless Clients" to see which clients are connecting to which Airport.

viafax999 wrote:
coolhwhip wrote:
Thanks for the reply. Like I said, I am pretty new to this. So I need to buy something like this to put in my media center then?
http://www.amazon.com/Hawking-HWREN1-Hi-Gain-Wireless-300N-Extender/dp/B001DMEYCY/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie...
Do I even need the Wireless N router at all, or will the Westell do the trick? I'd be looking to stream HD from my main home PC, so I need good wireless speed.
I assume that there is a tv in your media center so what would make much more sense would be to get a coax splitter and split the coax at that tv and then move the vz westell router to the other side of the splitter. It really makes no matter where the westell router is on the coax setup and doing this should allow you to connect your devices directly to the router.
So the coax feed from the ONT comes in through the garage into the office and is connected to the Westell in the office (which is hard-wired into my office PC). If I move the Westell to the entertainment center I'll be in the same boat w/ my office PC then, i.e. needing a wireless connection to the Westell to get internet access. Am I missing something here?

HT5022 How do i use my airport extreme to extend my wireless network, or make the signal stronger

I have a wireless modem/router and want to use my airport extreme to strengthen the signal throughout my house...how do i do that?

Plan to establish a permanent Ethernet cable connection from one of the available LAN <-> ports on your modem/router to the WAN "O" port on the AirPort Extreme. Locate the AirPort Exteme in a central location in the general area where more wireless coverage is desired.
Configure the AirPort Extreme using AirPort Utility to "create" a wireless network using the exact same wireless network name, same exact wireless security settings and same exact password that your modem/router uses.
Finally, the Extreme must be configured in Bridge Mode to operate correctly with the modem/router.
To get everything in the proper sequence on the network....once the Extreme is configured, power off the entire network for a few minutes. Then start the modem/router first and let it run a minute by itself. Then start the Exteme next the same way. Continue starting devices the same way until the entire network is back up.

I have 2 macs and 2 PC laptops in my home wireless network. Can I use the Airport/Time Capsule hard drive to back up all 4 machines? I know that I will have to use different back up software on the PCs, but is it possible over the wireless network?

I have 2 macs and 2 PC (Windows 7) laptops in my home wireless network. (The iMac is hardwired via ethernet to the Airport/Time Capsule; the others are wireless connections using Airport). I want to use the hard disk drive in the Time Capsule as a network backup drive for all 4 computers. Is this possible? Could someone help me by telling me how to configure it? I know I will have to use different backup software in the 2 Windows 7 Laptops? Do I need to use the Windows backup software, or can I use a third party program like Acronis True Image? Thanks in advance for the help

It is your fault, pondini.. all your fault.
I read of all the things that go wrong restoring Time Machine backups.. particularly stupid things like mail, photo libraries don't go back.. etc. And looking through the incredible number of issues people have here, when their Mac finally takes a dive how hard it is to restore.
I restored a test hard disk from a TC.. and it takes ages and ages to even make up its mind to start.
I worked in computer support for ages, but not Macs.. so my experience is ghost.. ghost images.. on large commercial server setups, can stream restore to multiple computers at once.. even doing it computer by computer the image is simple as network boot to restore. But ghost went the way of Symantec.. sigh!! And was destroyed.
A product like clonezilla, Free linux boot cd.
http://lifehacker.com/5078397/clonezilla-backs-up-and-restores-your-disks
Can backup a Hard disk in just about any format.. yet to try it on a Mac to a TC.. but I will. Boot from CD.. instead of your lost Lion partition which no longer exists (because the hard drive had to be replaced) and the DVD they no longer give you, and restore the entire hard disk in a couple of hours .. to the exact image at the point you made the clone.. in any format, with any partitions.
My bet is that it will kill TM .. but you could be right.
It is just the prospect of all those permission changes, photos and mail libraries etc that worry me.

DHCP Server - Different Range for Wired and Wireless Network

We have DHCP setup on Windows Server 2012r2 and the range given to us by the main HQ is 10.65.112.1-10.65.112.254 (there are several exclusions under this range)
Now since the range gets exhausted quickly, they provided another one 10.65.122.1-10.65.122.254.
What our branch would love to do is to dedicate the first range for Wired Computers and the other range for Wireless Devices (Phone,Tablets, Mobiles)
Right now we have 2 different scopes setup in DHCP, the second one is disabled. In our network we have 6 access points and also have a CISCO SG300-52 Managed Switch. It has an inbuilt DHCP Server and also has the function for DHCP Relay. But we are not actually using any of its functionality as of now.
So my question is how to have 2 separate ranges for wired and wireless network. People have mentioned vlans but I have no clue on how to get that done.
Is there a simpler way avoding V-LANS or if not, would love to get step by step procedure on how to go about this. Any help will be much appreciated
Regards,
Sheldon

Hi Sheldon, please read this post
https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2270049
You will need some modifications though. Steps 1-6 is very relevant. On step 6, you need to pay particular close attention to the "default router". If the SX300 handles your intervlan routing then the default router needs to be the IP of your VLAN. If you have a different device to handle VLAN routing then the default router needs to be that IP address.
-Tom
Please mark answered for helpful posts
http://blogs.cisco.com/smallbusiness/

Do I really need an Airport device for my home wireless network?

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