Here’s how one reader successfully set up their Airport Base station without using a Macintosh!
(Thanks to Helen Plotkin of Mathforum (Helen@mathforum.com) for this information!)

I’ve got a desktop PC, with two Ethernet cards, running Windows 98. I’ve got a cable modem plugged into the first Ethernet card on that PC. I’m running WinRoute Lite 3.0 (http://www.winroute.com/) on that PC to make it act as a NAT router. The second Ethernet card on that PC is set like this:

IPAddress ‘192.168.0.1’
IPMask ‘255.255.255.0’

From that second Ethernet card, I have a cable running to the first port on an Ethernet hub. My Apple Airport is connected to one of the ports on the ethernet hub. I downloaded the Karlbridge Configurator software version 3.54 and used it to set the Airport Base station like this:

IPAddress ‘192.168.0.10’
IPMask ‘255.255.255.0’
Gateway ‘192.168.0.1’

I’ve got a laptop PC with a Lucent WaveLAN/IEEE card set to these properties:

IPAddress ‘192.168.0.11’
IPMask ‘255.255.255.0’
Gateway ‘192.168.0.1’

There is another desktop PC on my hub, and it uses DHCP to get its IP address dynamically, but I could not get my Airport or laptop to work that way. My laptop is set to use the DNS servers supplied by my cable company.

So there it is. It works. No Mac needed to configure the Airport.


For information on setting up Airport Express, you can read Simon Brown’s weblog which also works as a how to guide. You can also get information on Airport Express & Windows from this Notebook Review forum.