Comments on: Airport Extreme on Telus DSL?

By: AnBr

AnBr — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:52:00 +0000

I had the same problem with my new Airport Extreme. The Airport received DNS adresses via the WAN, but did not distribute this to my laptop. It took me a few days to solve the problems, but after i entered DNS adresses in my laptop setupt, everything worked fine.

The problem is that everytime I try to connect a new device (my WAN cellphone, my Ipod Touch, my wifes laptop etc), it isn’t enough to know the password – they also have to change their network setup.

It should be possible to fix this permanently in some way.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 18:42:46 +0000

yeah. it doesn’t help that the documentation on the Telus sites is out of date and/or just plain incorrect. The problem had nothing to do with registering MAC addresses. Turns out, the only MAC they need is that of the switch they installed. Everything behind that is fine w/o registration. frustrating. That wasted a day and a half of my life.

By: PatrickQG

PatrickQG — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 17:01:18 +0000

It’s annoying when it’s something so small. At least it’s not a hardware problem

You can set a DNS server while leaving it to get IP+gateway automagically. As long as it is getting the IP/subnet/router via DHCP then you’re good. So my IPv6 is set to Using DHCP, but I can still manually set the DNS Server(s).

By: dnorman

dnorman — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 16:35:55 +0000

got it working. it felt like a DNS problem all along, but I didn’t realize that the Airport Extreme wasn’t pulling DNS info from DHCP, so nothing was resolving when it received the DHCP info from Telus. I set the internet panel to use “manual”, added the IP address I had been given (until it expires?) and then added the DNS servers. All’s well now. At least until my DHCP lease expires and I have to pull a new IP…

By: dnorman

dnorman — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:38:38 +0000

@patrick: ayup. I just updated the post with a handy dandy OmniGraffle diagram of the layout.

By: PatrickQG

PatrickQG — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:27:45 +0000

I seem to have missed a couple of words there. Randomly insert things until it makes sense

So as I understand it, your setup is:
ADSL Modem -> Telus Switch
Telus Switch -> Telus TV
Telus Switch -> APE WAN port
APE LAN Ports + APE Wireless -> computer?

By: dnorman

dnorman — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:27:19 +0000

disconnected the Telus switch and plugged the AE directly into the modem. Still only worked in Bridge Mode. And the TVs didn’t get a signal. Looks like I’ll get to spend another day trying to talk to someone at Telus.

By: PatrickQG

PatrickQG — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:24:22 +0000

That’s really weird.

Of all the option share single public IP should be the one to work. Have you tried changing the internal IP range?

I think telus might hand out non-public IP addresses until you register the mac address, and there might a conflict there.

TelusTV… they might need it to be outside of your home router. Depends I guess on the network topology & how the telustv service fits into it.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:12:48 +0000

@patrick: I’ve tried DHCP+NAT, and just the default DHCP without NAT setting. Rebooting everything multiple times, in different orders, just in case… No luck. Bridge Mode works, but “share a single public IP” doesn’t work at all.

@xeelee: this is the config that the Telus technician set up when he installed the TelusTV service the other day (but with my older/cranky Linksys router instead of the AE). I’ll try reversing the order, and maybe dropping out the Telus switch (which becomes redundant if using the AE as the router anyway).

By: Xeelee

Xeelee — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 13:38:45 +0000

Depends on the kind of modem you’ve got. If you have a bridge modem — one that doesn’t perform any kind of routing — you should connect the Base to it and then connect the switch to the Base. Having the switch between the Base and the modem is asking for trouble. This setup does require the Base to have routing enabled with “share a single IP address” as the Base becomes the WAN routing device on your side. It is unkown to me if your DSL uses PPPoE or just plain DHCP but you might want to check into that.

If you have a routing modem have it be the WAN routing device, then connect the Base to it so it gets a private LAN IP from the modem, then connect the switch to one of the base’s ethernet ports.

Either way you want to have the same device assigning IPs to your computers (preferably the Base) and getting the WAN IP address. That way if anything goes awry you only have to deal with that device.