Netgear Wg311t Under Linux With Airport Express

TimK

Registered
Hello,

Question 1 -- the biggie:
I'm running Airport Express as a router, sharing an ADSL connection between a PowerBook (from which I can also stream music to my stereo -- it's great) and a Linux machine running SuSE 9.3, in which I have installed a Netgear WG311T PCI wireless network card (802.11a/b/g). The Airport Express is configured to assign IP addresses using DHCP, and both the client computers are configured to get their addresses using DHCP.

This setup works fine when encryption is turned off, so it seems fundamentally sound.

However, with encryption (either 128-bit WEP or WPA-PSK) turned on, the Netgear card can contact the Airport Express and maintain a connection for about ten seconds, but then it consistently drops the connection and takes a second or two to re-establish it. The Netgear card and its associated interface also don't ever seem to get proper DNS service, because even a quick attempt to ping a hostname on the Internet while the connection appears to be up fails.

I believe that this is a configuration issue on the Linux machine, because I'm not certain of some of the settings I need to have there for its wireless interface to be configured correctly. Specifically, I am wondering what values I need to have for "default gateway" and "DNS server"; do I need to use the Airport Express's private IP address (10.0.1.1) for both, or should I use the values provided by my DSL service provider? And is there anything else that might be tricky?

This setup actually worked with WPA-PSK for a couple of days; then it fell down in the middle of an evening (I was using it at about 7 p.m., and an hour and a half later it began exhibiting the dropping-every-ten-seconds behavior again) and I haven't been able to get it working since.

Question 2:
From what I read on Apple's Web site, the Airport Express has a built-in firewall that is activated when the unit is configured to share an Internet connection. Is there any way to configure this firewall, or at least to see how it's set up?

Thank you for any help you can provide.

Best regards,
Tim Kynerd
 
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