4.7 Bridging

A big disadvantage to running NAT on your wireless hosts is that they become less accessible to your wired hosts. While the wireless users can make connections to any machine on the wire, connecting back through a NAT is difficult (the AirPort provides some basic support for this by allowing for static port mappings, but this is far from convenient). For example, if you are running a Windows client on the wireless, the Network Neighborhood will show other wireless clients only and not any machines on the wire, since NAT effectively hides broadcast traffic (which the Windows SMB protocol relies on). If you already have a DHCP server on your wired network, and are running private addresses, the NAT and DHCP functions of the AirPort are redundant, and can simply get in the way.

Rather than duplicate effort and make life difficult, you can disable NAT and DHCP and enable bridging to the wire. Turn off DHCP under DHCP Functions (as we saw previously), and check the Act as transparent bridge (no NAT) under the Bridging Functions tab. When the AirPort is operating in this mode, all traffic destined for your wireless clients that happens on the wire gets broadcast over wireless, and vice versa. This includes broadcast traffic (such as DHCP requests and SMB announcement traffic). Apart from wireless authentication, this makes your AirPort seem completely invisible to the rest of your network.

Once bridging is enabled, you may find it difficult to get the unit back into NAT mode. If it seems unresponsive to the Java Configurator (or Mac AirPort Admin utility) while in bridging mode, there are a couple of ways to bring it back.

If you have a Mac, you can do a manual reset. Push the tiny button on the bottom of the AirPort with a paper clip for about two seconds. The green center light on top will change to amber. Connect the Ethernet port on your AirPort to your Mac and run the admin utility. The software should let you restore the AirPort to the default settings. You have five minutes to do this before the amber light turns green and reverts to bridged mode.

If you're running Linux, you can easily bring the AirPort back online using Lucent's cliproxy utility, without needing a hard reset. Run the following commands from a Linux machine (either on the wire, or associated over the wireless):

$ cliproxy
[ORiNOCO]> show accesspoints
Searching...

Hostname      Eth Address    IP Address       Description
------------- -------------- ---------------- --------------------
NoCat         0030.42fa.cade 192.168.0.5      Base Station V3.64

[ORiNOCO]> configure remote 192.168.0.5 public
Config loaded from 192.168.0.5

NoCat> configure terminal

NoCat(config)> no service bridging

NoCat(config)> service napt

NoCat(config)> service dhcp-server

NoCat(config)> done

NoCat> write remote 192.168.0.5 public

NoCat> exit

Of course, substitute your password for public and IP address where applicable. At this point, the AirPort should reboot with NAT and DHCP enabled and bridging turned off.

If you're running Windows and need to reset an AirPort in bridged mode, I suggest you make friends with a Mac or Linux user. You might be able to get things back to normal by doing a hard reset (holding down the reset button with a paper clip for 30 seconds while powering the unit up), but I've never been able to make that work. The previous two methods—using a Mac hard reset or the Linux cliproxy utility—have worked well for me in the past. I keep a copy of cliproxy handy for just this reason.