Apple's Airport Series: A Router Worth Having

In my opinion, having one of these routers in your home is pretty much, if not definitely a necessary requirement. They make things oh-so-easy, and in true Apple style, clean, easy to use and wildly efficient.

Link: http://www.apple.com/au/compare-wifi-models/

Part of my job is to provide advice or make recommendations to my clients on new hardware or software to purchase when faced with a problem  that needs resolving, and usually needs resolving fast and permanent. I don't believe in a bandaid fix in my work, as it usually results in repeat work, and generally an unhappy customer.

Today I had a customer who was in dire need of a new internal network for his office. His modem/router/gateway device, whilst performing efficiently for at least the modem component is very dated and aged, and was starting to have DHCP and routing issues, as well as the wireless signal kept dropping out and was weak rendering it basically unusable. However, having had some experience with the AirPort line of products, I recommended he invest $119 in a small, simple and non-obtrusive device into his network, which would solve a lot of the routing issues, as well as enable easy shared printing.

I gotta tell you, it was great. Not only is the range on this little tiny device excellent, but the built in bonjour services as well as the static allocations for the various devices works excellently. I set the router up to be the PPP dialler also, meaning it handles the internet connection, all the modem needs to do now is keep doing what it does best, handle the data link between it and the DSLAM in the telephone exchange. The best part about this entire setup is that I configured the whole thing (except for the static allocations) without having to plug in a cable.

The AirPort family come in three different flavours currently. The baby of the group (the one I set up today) is the express model, which has a gateway ethernet port (to connect your modem to) and one ethernet port. You can either plug one device into this, such as a network printer, or computer that doesn't have a wireless connection. It has one USB port for either attaching a printer or a storage device, and apart from having the inbuilt wireless, it also has a jack to connect speakers to. Whilst the speaker jack is probably not so effective in an office environment, and probably aimed at the home user, it is great to have. Any Apple device can play music wirelessly through AirPlay to the speakers attached to the AirPort.

The bigger brothers of the AirPort express are the "extreme" models. You can either get one with a hard drive built into it for storing data or making easy backups, or you can get one without the internal storage. The extreme models also have a new technology built into them referred to wireless beaming as well as supporting the 802.11ac wireless standard. If you're streaming HD content, or need the extra range on wireless, this would be a better option over the express version. There are two extra ethernet ports (bringing the total to four, including one gateway port), and the speed of these ports on the extreme models is bumped up to 1gigabit up from 100megabit in the express model).

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Setting up any printer to use over a network in Windows

If you've bought a printer that's promised network printing, and it's come with a bunch of CD's, but you're having trouble getting it working, fear not, for there is a simple way to get it going.

Before we start, note that this guide has been designed for windows XP, however, the similarities between windows 7 are quite close, so you should be able to adjust easily, and follow along.

1.  The first step in this guide is turn off all your devices, including your modem, computer, and anything that connects to the network, including Wifi devices, but leave on the printer attached to the modem/router.
2. Next, what we want to do is just power on your modem/router so that the only device it's connected to is the printer. The purpose of these first two steps is to get the router to assign the first available IP address to your printer, which we'll come to later in this guide.
3. Then you can start to turn back on the other computers and devices that connect to the network.
4. Once on, click start, then go to printers and faxes in the menu.
5. Click add printer in the column on the left hand side.
6. In the wizard that pops up, click next to start the process.
7. The next screen will ask you for a local or a network printer. This is a very confusing question as we are adding a network printer, but it's on a local network, which means that we will choose the first option, a local printer attached to this computer. Click Next.
8. On the next page, go to bottom option which is create a new port, and then in the drop-down list, choose "Standard TCP/IP port"
9. When you hit next a new wizard will popup showing add port wizard.
10. This screen will ask you for the IP address of the printer. This will probably be one of the harder steps to complete as it's not immediately obvious which TCP/IP address you need to use.
11. The best way to check this for your printer would be look on the actual printer through the screens on it's mini screen if it has one. Failing that, you can log on to the modem/router and check the DCHP table. If this sounds a bit too technical for you, don't fret, we can try and take a pretty calculated guess at what the port will be.
1. Click start, then click run, and type CMD, then hit enter
2. Type ipconfig on the black dialogue box that appears.
3. You should see a few sets of number depending on what set up you have, but we are interested in the IP address of your computer, and the IP address of the default gateway.
4. If you default gateway is 10.1.1.1, and your computers IP address is 10.1.1.3 for example, it's pretty safe to bet that your printer is 10.1.1.2 because remember at step 2 earlier in this guide we turned on the printer first?
5. Similarly, if the address for the default gateway is 192.168.1.1, and your computer is 192.168.1.3 (see the pattern here) then your printer could be 192.168.1.2
12. With these addresses in mind, type the missing address in the box on the wizard screen, and then hit next.
13. If you have problems a this stage it probably means that the printer wasn't able to be located, or the address we have is incorrect. You can click back to try a different one if you wish. If not you may need to get the help of a technical friend or call in a computer tech to help.
14. With not problems, it should find the printer and prompt for a driver you'd like to use. In this screen you can choose from the list if your printer is listed, if it isn't pick the closest model, and failing that, chuck the CD into the drive, and click have disk.
1. Clicking have disk will open a new window, asking for the location of the disk, and to search automatically which you can choose to do.
15. Once the driver has been found hit next and it will install the printer on your system.
16. If it asks to keep the same driver, I would also recommend this as it's known to work, and we want to keep using something that works :)
17. The next screen will offer to name the printer and ask if you'd like to print a test page.
18. Now the momemt of truth - print the test page and if it comes through you're good to go. If not you may have missed something along the way I'd recommend going back and checking you've done each step.
19. Now click finish
20. You're done!

I will also post a guide to adding a network printer on a Mac shortly.

What does limited or no connectivity mean? And how to fix?

Update: If you are a Windows 7 or a Windows 8 user, the message you get may show that your Internet connection says limited access.

If you're using Windows XP, and you can't connect to the internet or anything else on your network, there is a good chance you've got this error. You may have a box with words similar to the image below appear on your screen.

What's happened? Well, when your computer connects to your modem or wireless router, it is asking for an address that is can use to communicate with other computers. If for whatever reason your modem/router is unable to give this address you get this error.

There are a couple of ways this can happen. Usually you've plugged the cables in, or your computer's wifi connection is up, but it's not getting any data flow.

As a result, there are a few different ways to fix it.

• Start by turning everything off for at least 1 minute. This includes the modem, the router, the computer and anything else you use on your network. This is also known as a power cycle.
• When everything is back up and powered on, if you're still getting the same error, you can try repairing the connection by hitting the repair button (as shown above)
• If this doesn't fix it, there is a command you can run through the command line program in windows which should help resolve the issue.
• Open the command line by clicking Start, then choosing Run
• At the prompt, type "cmd" (without the quotes) and hit enter
• You should have a black screen up with a prompt waiting for you to enter some text
• At this point, type in "netsh winsock reset" (again without the quotes)
• You will get a message saying successfully reset the winsock catalog, and it will say you need to reboot the machine.
• Reboot your computer.

• Lastly, if you're still reading and it's still not working, you can try factory resetting your modem/router that your computer is connecting to, which usually involves pressing the reset button on the back of the modem where all the plugs go or you can try with another modem/router.

These steps also apply to Windows Vista, and Windows 7. The error message is slightly different, saying "Connected with limited access" however, the steps taken to fix the issue are the same.

Setting up any printer to use with AirPrint for iOS devices.

I'll start off by saying this problem has annoyed me for a while.

When I first learned of AirPrint, I thought great! What an awesome idea, then I learned that Apple only wanted to limit it to a specific range of printers and this annoyed me, why couldn't we just use any printer attached to a computer that was part of the same wireless network to print?

Apparently, according to many, many other people, I'm not the only one who thinks this way, and thanks to the developers at Netputing there is a solution! They've designed a handy little piece of software which allows sharing over the wireless network in your house to provide for AirPrint. And it works well.

Without re-writing their webpage, head over to http://netputing.com/airprintactivator/airprint-activator-v2-0/ to download their latest version, as well as a handy video and screenshots for set up. Normally, I'd be happy to do that here, however they've already done the hard work and made it simple to use on their site.

The best part about their software? It's free. If however you do like the software, and you'd like to thank them for their hard work, they do have a donate button on the top of their site, and for such a great, simple piece of software that works so well, you may decide you'd like to contribute. I did, as I have been really happy with it.