airmac: easy for novice, difficult for wannabes

Due to an emergency ADSL modem equipment update, I was forced to reconfigure the home network, including the well used and loved AirMac Express (a.k.a. AirPort Express in the US). This convenient, little jack-of-all-trades device can act as a wireless router (with DHCP capability), extends the range of an existing WLAN network, wirelessly connects printers or other USB devices, and plays music wirelessly to stand-alone stereo using AirTunes. If there is no panacea for wireless ills, this comes pretty close. We have been happily connecting the device wirelessly to our family laptop to play music on our home Onkyo stereo for a few years now.

After setting up the new yahoo BB ADSL modem (w/ DHCP capability disabled) and Buffalo WLAN (with a new SSID name and security limiting access to devices with registered MAC addresses), I proceeded to reconfigure the AirMac Express (AE). Yet using the apple downloaded software, Airport Admin Utility and Airport Setup Assistant, I was unable to discover AE on the network. After a frustrating hour and a hard reset, I discovered AE on the network, but was now unable to complete the handshake procedure, encountering the very undescriptive "unknown error -6753". At this stage, I was stuck for hours. Is it the Windows XP Firewall blocking UDP flows? Maybe it is the sshd or other daemons that is consuming required network resources and/or port numbers? Maybe it is software and firmware incompatibility?

Finally, I realized the problem: I have set my TCP/IP setting for the wireless interface on my computer to a local-area fixed IP adddress (for Port Forwarding purposes, a topic for another entry another day), so when my computer tried to log onto AE network, AE was not able to assign it a new IP address in the address pool it has available. Now if the Apple literature would have stated explicitly that a computer needs to be logged onto the AE running DHCP, the oversight would have been obvious. But the literature is rail thin and the software scant, making the debugging process extremely difficult. Of course, if I were a novice, I would have never used a local-area fixed IP address for the WLAN interface in the first place. This, in fact, exmplifies a golden and damned design philosophy behind Apple Products for years: make all products sexy and eternally simple to use, but for the advanced users, leave few footprints for customization and fine-tuning. So the moral here is simple: if you want to use Apple products, be a novice, or be a master of your domain, more than any references you can find in on-line forums. Otherwise, you will join me in welcoming the morning sun with brandy red eyes and a throbbing head.