Airport Extreme, day 2

Monday, March 19, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Following up on yesterday's post on configuring the my MacBook Pro to work with the new Airport Extreme, I installed the software from the CD, but found that unless I plugged all the computers into the same router, they couldn't "see" each other. This created a problem, because the router I was using had five Ethernet jacks, and the Extreme only has three. I was able to juggle things around, which involved reconfiguring two routers, but eventually was able to get the four machines I wanted to connect to see each other, all through the Extreme. 

That set up the moment of truth, when I'd find out how much faster the Extreme is for the crucial job of moving media files between a server and a laptop. The answer: it's quite a bit faster.  

I find numbers fairly meaningless, so I took a movie of my MacBook Pro, in the kitchen, copying a movie from the Mac Mini in the den.; 

Movie: Demo of performance of Airport Extreme router.  

Now I have another problem. I need the Denon receiver to have a local IP address so I can control it via Firefox. With the Netgear router I looked it up on Attached Devices, and entered its address in the browser, and it just worked. The Airport Utility app doesn't seem to have a way to find the address of attached devices.