Geek Chic – Smart Design for the Style Conscious

I just moved in to a new apartment. It’s beautiful and I’m lucky to live where I do but there is one thing that sucks about it.

My wireless signal won’t go through my walls.

Now this wouldn’t be a problem in a new house with an open floor plan. I’ve lived in houses where I get signal out on the street sitting in my car and that was running of a 802.11 G router 5 years ago, so I understand my situation is unique.

Here is my current setup.

1. Airport Extreme 802.11N – Main Router
2. Airport Express 802.11N – Extender
3. Airport Express 802.11G – Extender w/ USB Printer

My current wireless clients are as follows

1. Macbook Pro 802.11G (2007)
2. Macbook Pro 802.11G (2006)
3. iphone 3G
4. iphone 3Gs
5. PC Server 802.11N

So I toiled and strained for days trying to get the mixture right. And because I’ve got different classes working with each other it was truly a matter of getting the right device to initialize in the correct sequence. So know this Paduan. If you too are trying to setup a new wireless network, using your Airport Expresses as Wireless Extenders, do the following.

Reset everything and unplug everything. Start in sequence.

1. Plug in your Modem (Cable/DSL)
2. Attach your main wireless router (Airport Extreme 802.11N) to your modem via ethernet.
3. Register to the Airport Extreme 802.11N’s network on your main client laptop.
4. Open Airport Utility on your laptop.
5. Run through the assisted setup.
6. Make sure to check the box that reads Allow this network to be extended
7. Once this is completed and the router has reset to a solid green state, plug in the wireless device (in my case, an Airport Express 802.11N)
8. Using the same laptop, you should now see the second device show up in the Airport Utility window.
9. Select the device and run through it’s setup. (it will ask you to “switch” networks)
10. You are setting up the Airport Express to join the existing network and “extend” it’s range. Any other setup will screw everything up so make sure to check the box when you’re asked.
11. Once you’ve got the green status light a glowing on the second Airport Express, you can check on your overall network health under the Advanced > Statistics Tab in the Airport Utility application.
12. At the bottom of the window you’ll see a Logs and Statistics button. Select that to bring up a real time graph of all the wireless traffic on your network.

The most important thing to remember is to reset EVERYTHING FIRST and work in sequence to make it perfect. If you skip a step or get a little lazy, I swear to you you’ll end up spending days trying to get the mixture right.