Airport Extreme For Windows

[Justina Ky]

WhenI talk about "recognizing" or "showing" the airiport extreme and express, I mean that they show up in the opening window when I start up the airport utility app. I've attached a screen shot. (Since I'm not having the problem at the moment, I can't produce a screenshot of the window displaying my problem. But I'm confident it will happen again.)

What happens when I am having a problem is that, when I open Airport Utility, this opening page says briefly that it is discovering airport devices, and then it reports that it cannot find any devices and produces a button which permits me to "rescan." Of course, the rescan does not locate my airport extreme and express.

The really odd thing in connection with this behavior is that the airport extreme works fine as a router, and even when I cannot find it in Airport Utility, the light on the airport extreme glows green and permits anybody who signs onto my wireless network to use it normally.

My problem shows up with my laptop, which is running Windows 10 and (obviously) using the Windows version of Airport Utility, version 5.6.1. My airport extreme is a 5th generation, and the firmware version is 7.6.9.

My only clue is that I seem to be able to find my airport devices for awhile after I have done something in the nature of a reboot. Then after awhile, they disappear again. The things that I have done that enable me to find the airport devices are--

AirPort Utility for Windows is long out of date, since it was designed to work with Windows 7. It is a known fact that Windows 10 no longer officially supports SMB1, which the AirPort routers use for some communications.

It is possible....but not recommended.....to enable SMBv1 on the Windows 10 PC. Whether or not that would help with the AirPort Utility application is open to question. We really need a PC guy to post and help us out.

A guess would be that AirPort Utility 5.6.1 is simply not going to work reliably with Windows 10. Last resort.....again not recommended......would be to try turning off the Windows firewall on the PC.

Unfortunately, Apple has not changed or updated AirPort Utility for Windows in over 6 years..... since the times of Windows 7......so if you have an iPhone or iPad, you could try running AirPort Utility for iOS to see if that might work more reliably.

It may or may not be a factor that your AirPort Extreme is at least 5+ years old and as much as 7+ depending on when it was originally placed into service, but the average useful life of the AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express is about 5 years before it starts to head downhill.

As far as a "closed network", Apple specifically recommends against using a "closed" or "hidden" network in their support documents, so that may or may not be a factor here as well. Here is what Apple Support says:

Because hidden networks don't broadcast their SSID, devices might need more time to find them and connect to them. Hiding a network doesn't secure your Wi-Fi network, because the SSID can still be discovered in other ways.

Well, I tried all those suggestions. Shortened the names of the devices to 4 and 6 characters. Went to "Link-local only." DIsabled the closed network. My thought was that all of these things promised to improve the quality of my network connections, and I could see no way that any of them could make things worse. I would say that AirPort Utility probably maintained its ability to find my airport express and extreme longer than before. But when I reopen AirPort Utility this morning, it no longer can find the devices.

One question. This behavior is a bit similar to that of a Canon printer of mine, which kept dropping off another network I maintain until I assigned a static IP address for it. Then the dropoffs ceased. Is there anything similar that can be tried here? I will note that both my Radio Mode and Radio Channel Connection for my router are set for "automatic."

We use Regus's shared Internet and I've create a sub network for our office by using DHCP and NAT on the airport extreme router. Now the Airport Extreme complains there is Double NAT - but it still appears to work fine. I manually set the DNS servers on each client's network adapter and everything works.

What I am trying to do is set it up so the DHCP from the router auto assigns the DNS servers to the client machines without me having to manually enter them for each client. The problem is when I set the DNS servers on the router to 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.1 - this doesn't work and web pages don't load. I am a bit stuck here and manually entering the DNS servers will prove to be a longer process. How can I get the DNS servers to auto assign?

I've been advised that it's better to use the Windows server as a DHCP server, but unfortunately if I want to use the router with NAT, DHCP is forced. Is it better for me to have the Windows Server as the router with NAT and have the Airport as just a bridge?

Using an Airport Extreme as dhcp server is not a good idea when anyone haves a complex LAN/Scenario, because in the dhcp server you can only set 2 ipv4 dns server address, so in your case use the primary for the internal resolution (win server) and use the secondary for a public dns server (ISP/other) don't forget to set your internal domain name (if you have one) in the "Domain Name" filed.

In other hand you can configure your windows server to resolve internal and external query names to do this, first configure your local domain and internal dns records in your windows server (don't forget the reverse records for each host), and finally in your windows server configure the forwarders in DNS-> your zone click on Action menu, click Properties and the Forwarders tab, click edit and finally type the ip address of your ISP DNS servers, in your Airport Extreme router only configure 1 dns server this one must be the ip address of your windows server.

If you were talking about using an L3 switch or a switch/router more geared toward the enterprise, where you could control the individual ports, that would be a different story. You would have a great deal more granular control...

In this case, it is my opinion that you need something "smarter" than an airport router. In your case I would say that using a windows box for this would be the least you could do. I don't know what kind of budget you are running, or the size of your organization, but it really sounds like you are exceeding the capabilities of your current network infrastructure and you should really consider a cisco switch or something with a bit more... umph...

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