an idiot's (me) guide to turn your Airport Express into a WDS access point

About a week ago I managed to find an amazing deal on a practically brand new Tivo on eBay with a lifetime subscription attached to it. Since the seller lived in the bay area, it was easy to set up a clandestine pickup at nearby Union City Landing at midnight to save on shipping charges and hassle (okay, it wasn't really secret, but it WAS in a parking lot at midnight!).

By the next day, we were pretty much up and Tivo-ing. The only problem was that there was no channel info! Being a complete Tivo n00b, I didn't know that it would have to dial home to its mothership quite often to get all the info that makes it so useful. So after a trip to Radio Shack for a telephone line splitter and a trip to my parents for an extra, extra long phone cord, the Tivo slllooowwwly got all this info.

Besides possibly tying up my phone line and being slow, I was pretty happy. But then I got to wondering, what if I could just hook up my Tivo to my Airport Express? It's wireless, right? It should be easy, right? Well, it is, but Apple doesn't officially support WDS for the AX for third party wireless routers. So of course I turned to the internet!

The internet had plenty of answers, but that was a problem. What I found was all kinds of slightly different solutions, but almost all of them required that I flashed the firmware on my router with third party open source code. My initial thought was that doing so was a bad idea, but I was convinced it would be possible and I'd be saving myself 40-60$ in getting a wireless adapter for the Tivo (Cathryn had fortunately saved her USB ethernet adapter, a Linksys 200M, from her old computer so I was set).

It turns out updating the firmware on my router WAS indeed an incredibly bad idea. I started out with a working system at 8:30 in the morning, and a dead router as soon as I started to fiddle around with things. By the grace of something and maybe some sheer luck, I went from updated Linksys firmware to partially working router to third party firmware and a dead router back to updated firmware with a dead router all the way back to my original firmware and everything working like it used to 7 and half hours later; with the weird exception that I seemed to have turned on the SES button somehow, somewhere along the way.

So the moral of the story is DON'T CHANGE YOUR ROUTER FIRMWARE! And here is a guide on how to make your Airport Express not only stream your tunes, but also act as an bona fide internet givin' access point through its ethernet port.

1. Make sure your AX has updated firmware (I don't know if this step is completely necessary, but unlike updating the firmware on your router, updating your AX shouldn't be a big deal - my current version is v6.3) This guide is for the WRT54G v3 - any other ones I can't guarantee this will work with.

2. Hook up your AX directly to an available port on your router via ethernet cable

3. Launch the airport admin utility, and choose to configure your AX (if it doesn't appear in your selection menu, you may have to reset it)

4. In the Aiport tab
- choose to "Create a Wireless Network"
- name the network the EXACT same name as your wireless network
- for your wireless security choose the EXACT same type of security protocol as on your router (I'm using WEP - the only protocol that both my AX and Linksys router seem to share), and use the same password you're using to access your wireless network (not your router)
- choose the SAME channel as your router is using
- choose the SAME mode your router is using (see a pattern here? mine is set to 802.11g Only)

5. In the Internet tab
- connect using Airport (WDS)
- for your MAC Address, go to your router and find it under the "wireless" tab. This is where I made my mistake. I wrote down the first MAC address I saw, which was the router's, which is so very wrong. Make sure you get the wireless MAC address.
- configure with DHCP and see if that works, but the site I got all these instructions from said to do it manually:
IP 192.168.1.2
Subnet 255.255.255.0
Router 192.168.1.1

6. In the Network tab
- make sure the Distribute IP addresses box is unchecked

7. Skip, port mapping and access control

8. In the WDS tab
- check the "enable" box as a "remote base station"
- check allow wireless clients on this base station
- your main airport ID should already be filled out

9. In the Music tab
- you probably want to enable AirTunes, right?
- iTunes speaker name: whatever you type in here shows up in iTunes as the remote speaker

10. Click on the "update" button and watch the magic happen. In less than a minute you should see your AX light turn green and your AX appear on the airport admin utility list.

11. Disconnect your AX from the ethernet port and tote it over to plug it in wherever you plug it in! For me, I took it into the living room and plugged in my Tivo and now it gets its updates super fast from the internet :) As a bonus, it seems like the AX connection to my computer is now more stable, so music streaming is better, too!

I'm so very glad everything worked out in the end. But no more hacking/modding for me - I don't think I have the nerves for it! Thanks to Hitesh for moral support and the Mac OS X Hints article where I got all this info from :)