I wanted to put my DVR (and, when it arrives, my Blu-Ray player) on the Internet, but I had no wired connection anywhere nearby. So, after a little investigation, I decided that the easiest way to get the job done was to buy an Apple Airport Express and use WDS to extend the house network and take advantage of the Ethernet port on the Airport Express to provide wired connectivity to my devices.

And since I was using all Apple gear (a Time Capsule is my other router), it’d just work.

Except that when I followed Apple’s setup instructions, the Airport Express kept connecting and disconnecting from the mothership with this error message:

Deauthenticating with station [redacted] (reserved 2)


After a bunch of Googling, I found a solution which worked, though I don’t know why:

1. Turn off all wireless security on the Time Capsule but leave WDS enabled
2. Restart the Time Capsule
3. Hard reset the Airport Express
4. Configure the Airport Express for WDS
5. Restart the Airport Express
6. Wait for the green light on the Airport Express and make sure things work
7. Reconfigure security to normal (WPA/WPA2) on the Time Capsule and restart it
8. Reconfigure security to normal (WPA/WPA2) on the Airport Express and restart it
9. It just works!

And now my DirecTV DVR is connected to the Internet and I can finally remove the phone cord that snakes over to the DVR from the kitchen.