How do I make my new Airport Extreme a base station?

I have been using an Airport Extreme (5th generation) as my base station router for a few years. I set the main network for my and my wife's use and created a guest network for when my sons visited and needed to use the wi-fi connection. I used passwords for both networks. Today I purchased a new 802.11 ac Airport Extreme. I unplugged the 5h gen. Extreme and plugged in the new Extreme. After a short hunt, my new 27" (late 2013) iMac found the new Extreme and had me set up a name and a password for it using Airport Utility. I was expecting it to ask if I wanted to set up a guest network, but it did not. I was expecting it to ask since I believe that is what happened when I installed my 5th gen Extreme a few years ago. For the 5th gen Extreme, I had to enter a password to protect settings on the Extreme, a WPA2 password for my main network and another password for my guest network. It took about 10 minutes to set up. For this new Airport Extreme I entered just one password. It took about 2 to 3 minutes for the entire setup. When I checked the menu in the Airport Utility under "Base Station", all lines are grayed out. Under the File Menu in Airport Utility, "Configure Other" is available, but "Import Configuration file" and "Export Configuration file" are also grayed out. I checked Network Settings in System Preferences and I see my new network name in the Wi-Fi menu and under the "Advanced..." button, I see the old and new Networks listed in the "Preferred networks" box.
So, how do I get the new Airport Extreme to act as the Base station and be able to enter a guest network? Does it require me to delete the old Network name from the Advanced... button page in System Preferences > Network Settings? Will I just have to start all over with the new Extreme to make it a base station?

Hello Leo,
I'm not at home so can't confirm but I can only assume that maybe some of the "old" settings in airport utility have changed, and simplified. Hence why you probably only need one password.
When I bought the new "tower" like AirPort Extreme, I just plugged it into the Ethernet, powered it on with the previous generation Extreme in place and in Airport Utility it just asked me if I wanted to copy the settings to the newer device, which included a few "port forwarding" settings. All done in this sequence. I didn't have guest network set up but you can still set up guest network under wireless in Airport Utility, hope this helps!

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Some input and/or assistance is appreciated. I purchased a new 802.11ac Airport Extreme. I have an old Netgear wndr3300 (802.11n, 2.4 or 5GHz). I'm trying to repeat the 2.4GHz using the Airport Extreme as the master router and the Netgear as the repeater. The Netgear DOES have an option for repeating in the admin menu. I've followed what instructions I was given on the admin menu regarding providing the MAC address of the Airport to the Netgear router. I have had no success finding a place to enter the MAC address of the Netgear router on the Apple router if that is necessary. Can anyone assist?

While in close proximity to the TC, I can successfully browse the web and can log into the NG routers admin panel and view its settings. However, when I go out into the garage, the signal stays very strong, but I lose connectivity to the Internet.
When in close proximity to the TC, the Netgear is picking up a strong signal.
Move the Netgear device out to the garage....but do not power it up.
Log on to the TC wireless, if you can. That very weak and slow signal.....if you can log onto the Internet at all....is the same signal that the Netgear will be receiving.
A repeater or extender or whatever you want to call it can only repeat or extend the quality of signal that it receives. It won't make a slow signal faster or a poor quality signal better.
Therefore, the normal location for an repeater or extender would be a point that is about half way between the TC and and the garage.
Extending this way always results in significant compromises in performance. The extender needs to be close to the TC to get a good signal to extend. At the same time, you want a strong signal from the repeater for devices in the garage, so the extender needs to be close to the garage.
It cannot be close to the TC and be close to the garage at the same time with any method that I know of.
You may need to look at running an Ethernet cable out to the garage if you want good performance out there. Since there is no signal loss in a wire, the device in the garage gets a top quality signal to work with.

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I could find no solution in the troubleshooting and set up pages. The only thing I couldn't check out was "Hardware access control" since I don't know how to access this control and no instructions that I could find were given as to how to do this.
I ended up hardwiring the G5 directly to the Airport using the Ethernet ports. This is less than ideal since I am required to locate the Airport near the G5, defeating the purpose of having the Airport, at least for the G5. I am still able to connect my PC and MacBook Pro wirelessly, though and, ironically in the case of the PC, have never had any trouble with these. I am still baffled but don't have the time to "play" anymore and at least I have a functioning, if not ideal, system.
I don't see the point in purchasing a new AE, since I have had this same problem throughout with various configurations and pieces of hardware and the problem persists in exactly the same way no matter what I swap out. I recently purchased and installed the latest issue of AE card in the G5. I think the problem is in the G5, either in the configuration or in the hardware.
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Hi K,
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I purchased an AirPort Time Capsule because of the modem capability.
There is no modem in the airport routers.. they are all plain ethernet routers.
It sounds like you have adsl modem.. and I would just leave it alone.
But if you want to play and your ISP supports PPPOE and the modem allows bridging or bridge mode.. then you can bridge the modem and use TC to establish the link to the ISP.. on the internet tab use PPPOE and put in your ISP username and password.
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Hi
Thanks for Swift reply.
Yep - I in fact have two A1088 and one A1264
I actually bought the new router because the Jensen
router always lost connection to the Airport Express after some hours or days. I
always needed to restart my Jensen to play music and that was driving my wife
mad. The hope was that the Extreme should fix this. Both A1088 have been set up
to only stream music to two of my stereo amplifiers from my PC’s Itunes library.
Are the A1088 now useless?
The A1264 has been set up to feed internet into a Denon Reciever that needed Ethernet cable.
Please advise
Regards
Sigve

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I've been told I need to unhide the AE so the printer can see it.
Advice likes this sounds good.....IF.....you previously enabled the option to "hide" your network. Chances are, you would know if you did do this, but if you are not sure, you can check to see if the network really is "hidden".
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Just plugged in a new Airport Extreme to replace a BT HomeHub 3.0. The wi-fi download speeds have generally increased over a wider range in the house but the wi-fi upload speeds have dropped to under 1Mbps.
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I had followed the instruction to reset the APEBS depressing the button first whilst powered then without power and during the unit being reconnected to power supply thinking tha this would do a full restore to factory defaults (effectively undoing all the messing- around I may have done flounderinng through the settings) but it was only when I was directed to do a full reset through the Airport Utility settings [Edit\Advanced\Restore Defaults] that this worked (for me).
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Thinking to leave as is for now- one 2013 extreme.
That would certainly keep things a lot simpler.
Does it seem right that using speed test I'm getting similar speeds, no matter if I'm connected via wi-fi, or Ethernet?
A very good sign assuming those speeds are reasonably close to the your plan offered by your ISP. The Extreme itself is capable of much faster speeds than your ISP can ever hope to provide.
I'm thinking that all the speed in the world is not going to change Time Warner Cable, the provider for earthlink cable
Not sure what you mean here. Time Warner provides various plans, some up to 50 Mbps. I get 60+ consistently with this plan. I had a 30 Mpbs plan before that consistently delivered about 35-36 Mbps.
The math is simple. If you download a lot of files from the Internet, a 50 Mbps connection is going to take half as long to download a file as a 25 Mbps connection, for example.
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I have a brand new airport extreme. I just ordered a WD My Book Studio 2TB Mac External Hard Drive Storage USB 3.0 Can I partition this and use one 1tb as a time capsule and 1tb on my desktop of my mac as a wireless hard drive? If so how?

How would I do this?

To partition the WD My Book, you could temporarily connect it to your MacBook Pro via USB. Then use the Disk Utility to partition it into two separate partitions of whatever size you choose for each.
Once partitioned and formatted (I would recommend HFS+), you can then disconnect the drive from the MacBook Pro and attach it to the new AirPort Extreme. The Extreme should now "see" the drive as two separate drives. You would then use the AirPort Utility to share out both drives.
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How do I make my new Airport Extreme a base station?

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