managing your airport network
I’m in charge of the network at my company, and one of the things I manage is the AirPort network we have. Here are some of the tools I use.
The first place to start is of course Apple’s AirPort support page. It is a great stepping off point to find documentation and tools, though it has a tendency to change, making that great document you like disappear overnight. The most useful document there is Designing AirPort Networks (pdf). It is mostly a best-practices guide, and doesn’t really delve into nuts and bolts. The other doc I have found so useful is a list of default settings on modern AirPort base stations. Unfortunately, it disappeared, but here is a mirror.
There are some great freeware and shareware tools out there to help you get a handle on things too. The best wireless monitor app out there in my opinion is MacStumbler. It will list all available networks, their MAC address, signal strength, if a password is needed, and tag it with a date and time the network was seen. Its only downfall is that it does not list hidden networks, which may or may not be an issue for your particular situation. Many folks like iStumbler, which will also scan for bluetooth and Rendezvous, but I find the interface of MacStumber to be more friendly.
Finally, Apple has a pair of management utilities. AirPort Management Tools includes AirPort Client Monitor, and AirPort Management Utility. Client Monitor will give you a nice readout of signal strength and signal noise, as well as throughput on your machine. It is a fine-tuning tool, and will help you as you try to determine the actual throughput in various places on your site. Management Utility is a centralized place to view base station information you won’t see with any other tool. You can view your base station’s logs, see how many clients are connected and their MAC addresses, and you can compare and contrast the configurations for all your base stations at once. All of these are fantastic tools for troubleshooting.
~tgp
December 13th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
Can I bounce a question off you?
I’m using generic Belkin 802.11g Access Points (F5D7130) with the AirPort card in my iBook. It would seem that I can’t walk 5 feet away without loosing signal… it works so poorly that I’m starting to feel like I might as well plug in. Even being only inches away from the access point, Internet Connect is only showing me like 65% bars.
Will the AirPort Client Monitor help me figure out what my crappy problem is? By comparison, it would seem that the wireless Broadcom adapters in other Dell Latitude D600 laptops have better range.
Are Apple ™ brand AirPort base stations better? Isn’t it all the same 802.11 stuff?
Signed,
Wireless with a Wire.
December 13th, 2005 at 7:55 pm
Dear WwaW,
Typically, iBooks have fantastic range, due to the antenna running around the entire edge of the screen. Perhaps the antenna wire is not properly seated in your airport card?
I’m not sure if the Client Monitor will work with non-apple access points, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
And yes, they are all more or less the same internals, but with different design. I haven’t found that AirPorts are particularly better, but the WEP password translation stuff works well Apple-to-Apple.
December 15th, 2005 at 1:51 pm
I installed AirPort Client Monitor (works great with non-Apple access points) and watched some bars. To my horror, the red (noise) and green (signal) twisted around each other like they were magnetically attracted or something.
Even when I was two feet away.
Remembering that I’d recently torn apart my iBook to replace it’s horribly placed hard drive, I figured that you might be right about the antenna cable not being seated. To I popped up the keyboard and pushed down on the connector… nothing. Then I pulled the connector out, watched the signal and noise rise to zero, and pushed it back in. To my surprise the signal came back, and stayed well above the noise! My range is now a good 50-60 feet (at least) and all is well.
Good call! And thanks for the tip about AirPort Client Monitor… it’s tons better than the going-going-gone-at-a-ten-second-delay status bar signal display.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:01 am
World Wide Web Resources…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…