I returned from a trip to discover that my router had died. This is, unfortunately, a common occurrence; I think this latest is perhaps the seventh router corpse I’ve left in my wake. Fundamentally, home routers are consumer-grade devices, manufactured by the low bidder, and as such seem to have internal demise timers closely associated with the end-of-warranty date.

The Apple Airport Extreme had been recommended to me in the past, but I’d passed on it due to lack of gigabit ports, which were commonly available with competing products. However, this deficiency has recently been addressed, so it was time for some serious investigation.

I’ve recently subscribed to Don McAllister’s excellent ScreenCastsOnline, which is a treasure trove of Mac reviews and tutorials. Don covered the Airport Extreme in ScreenCast 87; it’s a very comprehensive overview of the product, providing details that aren’t available in other review formats — video is hard to beat in this regard.

The clincher, however, was the following warranty statement on the product homepage:

The AppleCare Protection Plan for your computer covers the AirPort Extreme Base Station.

Well, that was the sale — I’ve already got the 3-year AppleCare plan, and at the rate I’ve been going through routers, that’s at least two of them I won’t need to buy.

I live within walking distance of an Apple Store. Glorious, is it not? My need was quickly fulfilled there, and I returned home to install the new box.

The Extreme is quite minimalist compared to my various deceased routers, sporting only a single LED on the front. The requisite ethernet ports and a USB port are on the rear. The unit is similar in dimension and style to a Mac Mini.

Setup was simple enough; plug everything in, bring up the Airport utility on the Mac, and follow the bouncing ball. Unfortunately, rather than the solid green LED of joy and happiness, I was presented with a flashing amber LED, indicating some problem.

Upon investigation, the Airport was complaining that PPPOE wasn’t working. I fiddled with the relevant settings a few times, to no avail. This was a bit of a puzzler, since PPPOE had been working on the late, lamented router. In desperation, I changed the connection type from PPPOE to stock Ethernet and…presto, connection, although there was some complaint about a double NAT going on.

Weird….that wasn’t supposed to work; my ISP requires PPPOE, and where was that double NAT error coming from?

I learned a great deal in the next few minutes. My DSL modem, as is somewhat common here in the Bay Area, where RBOCs come to die, is a Siemens SpeedStream 5100B:

Interestingly, this is far from a dumb modem; it’s actually quite an intelligent device, providing NAT function and PPPOE on the modem. SBC had shipped the modem with a CD containing the usual selection of blechware; I’d installed it to configure the modem then purged it immediately when we had a difference of opinion as to what my browser home page should be. As it turns out, that initial configuration had set up the modem to do PPPOE and NAT by itself; it had no need of a router for those functions.

Now, that sounds great, and it’s a nice thing for people with simple needs who wouldn’t otherwise have any kind of protection. However, it’s problematic when a router and the need to run VPN software come into play, as the NAT tables on the modem seem to overflow periodically, causing connections to drop. I’d been having this happen for years, but had just resigned myself to accept it, as I was unaware of the issue and customer service was certainly no help (“have you tried clearing your browser cache….”).

The solution here is actually very simple once you understand the problem. Onboard PPPOE can be turned off by connecting to the modem directly at its 192.168.0.1 address, entering the hardware access code printed on the bottom of the modem, and setting onboard PPPOE to off; at this point the Airport can be configured to handle PPPOE tasks, and only one device will be doing NAT. In my case, the modem wouldn’t take the access code, but was receptive to a paperclip in the hardware reset port.

This has happily solved a number of aggravating problems for me. As but one example, VPN connections which previously could be expected to terminate with some odd error after a couple of hours now stay up indefinitely.

Odd that the old router didn’t complain about this at all. Good riddance, I suppose.

 

Tags: Networking

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted an entry here. To my loyal readers, my apologies to both of you; the day job has just been a bit busy this year.

However, some good stuff is in the works. Stay tuned.