gdgt

Just wanted to pass along my experience with setting up the Airport Extreme base station with a Motorolo SB 5120 cable modem.

Previously, I had been using a Linksys WRT54g v6, and had cloned the cable modem's MAC address -- so when I got started setting up the Airport Extreme, the first thing I did was drop into manual setup and start trying to find how to clone the MAC address (you can't, as far as I can tell or find on the internet). In the manual setup, there is **very** little documentation about what the various settings mean -- for example, I wasn't sure what to put in the "IP address" field of the DHCP setup (the desired IP address for the router? The IP of the cable modem on the local network? My WAN IP address?), and the instruction manual is next to worthless for setting this up.

I went to bed after about 3 hours of tinkering, disappointed and determined to return it and get a similar Linksys.

Then it hit me -- this base station is designed for minimal user interaction (i.e., suitable for dummies) -- and I did something I REALLY hate to do -- I ran the setup wizard and let it try to set itself up. And lo and behold, I was on the internet in less than 1 minute! I had my port mappings done about 5 minutes later, and had added my Airport Expresses and AppleTV to the network with no problems.

So, here's my advice. Do what I did and run the setup wizard. You can always go in afterwards through "manual setup" and change the settings as you see fit, but better to get off on the right foot and at least be on the net.

And so far, it's great! I no longer have interference issues with 2.4GHz sources in the house, which was my main reason for buying this. And the only thing I don't like compared with the WRT54g is the startup time -- the Linksys could restart in about 15 seconds, while this thing takes about 2 minutes. Hopefully I won't have to restart this one as much, though! :-)