Connecting an Original Airport Base Station(M5757) to my exsisting network

[vilem]

TL;DR Can I incorporate an early model Airport Base Station into my current network setup by plugging it in to an empty LAN port?

I picked up a G4 Cube that I've got back up and running perfectly. It's been a long journey to get this thing running too. I thrifted a Cube power supply for $5 one day, then set a saved search for "g4 cube" on eBay. One night, eBay notified me of an in good shape Cube that was listed as parts only because he couldn't test it because he didn't have a power supply for it. He had it BIN for $100 or best offer. I offered him $60(free shipping) and he took it! It came to my door completely shattered because he had packaged it in two boxes, but the second bigger box didn't have any packing material in it, so it must have taken a tumble and shattered the aged acrylic. Guy is nice about it after pictures, asks me what I think it is worth to me, and I tell him about $20. So he refunds me $40 and I have just the Computer part.

https://imgur.com/EOZnPG4

My eBay saved search sends me an alert for an auction about Cube parts, it's a lady piecing out 4 Cubes that she has come across because she too, doesn't have any power supplies to test them. I contacted her about the Acrylic off of one of them and she agrees to sell it to me for $40! So now I'm back to where I should have been.

https://imgur.com/jp0vbZo

After the Acrylic shows up I get to reassembling my Cube and start to troubleshoot it to get it up and running. It booted to just a blank screen at first, so I replaced the battery. Then intermittently it would boot to OS 9.2 or OSX randomly it seems. I whittled the problem down to one bad stick of ram, I had 2x256mb sticks and 1x128mb stick, it was the 128mb that was bad, so I just tossed it.

The Optical drive was completely broken, as per usual on these Cube CD/DVD drives. I had an old iBook lying around so I used it in TDM and used it's DVD drive to get my brand new 160GB 7200RPM modern(ish?) HD running OS 9.2.

https://imgur.com/CiSLqCp

So now I'm here, I can't get it to connect to my router because it doesn't seem to support any modern encryption methods.

https://imgur.com/uodc5mX

My question is can I incorporate an early model Airport Base Station into my current Router?

 

[Slix]

If you just need an "extension" of your network, you can always plug the AirPort Base Station into an existing ethernet jack in your house, and then set it up to broadcast a new set of IP addresses. However, that means that the Cube would be on its "own" network, separate from say, your iPhone's network. Using something like WDS is usually finicky and hard to keep working. That's ultimately a choice you'll have to make, but the new network way is a good way to separate the security aspects of using an older router. Mine is set up like this at home.

 

[eyoungren]

If you can do the following…

Turn off DHCP…
Assign the Base Station a static IP address OUTSIDE of your current router's address range but in the same subnet…

Then yeah, you can do that.

If the firmware for the Base Station does not allow this then you can't.

Example…my older ASUS router serves as an AP (Access Point). My main router has a DHCP address range of 192.168.0.5 to 192.168.0.99. The static address assigned to my AP is 192.168.0.201. It has it's own WiFi SSID, so anything that connects to that network gets assigned a dynamic address by the main router and gets internet/local network access.

If you can change the channel of the SSID on the Base Station you can even just extend the range of your main router by naming the SSID the same name as the main router's SSID name. Any device will hand off.

 

[swamprock]

I hooked an original graphite Airport base station into my network and it worked fine. It was a bit of a bandwidth hog, though; causing everything else to lag whenever I did any file transfers through the network. I only use it sporatically nowadays, preferring sneaker-net when I want to transfer files to any of my classic OS machines.