“It just works” — eventually

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.

4 thoughts on ““It just works” — eventually”

  1. Why was your DirecTV DVR connected to the phone line? I believe the only time it’s actually needed is for calling home to report on your PPV purchases… which, well you don’t need to do regularly :)

  2. Well, once upon a time, our TiVo absolutely had to be connected to the phone line to get its updates. And even the most recent HDirecTiVo yammered at me if it wasn’t able to phone home periodically. So when I swapped it out for the DirecTV DVR, I moved the phone line without even thinking about it.

  3. Wow. Thanks for sharing this. I really struggled with this and was almost ready to throw in the towel and go drop the money for one of the new 802.11N airport expresses and sell my old G model. Your solution did the trick and I am finally streaming airtunes to my old G express through my time capsule.
    The only change is that I found I had to do #8 before #7 or I lost connectivity with the express through the capsule. But maybe that was just me. Thanks very much for taking the time to post your successful solution, David!

  4. Fantastic. If only apples reams of support for multiple wirelesses etc could have done this… I have an n and a b/g and couldn’t get this to work but now it does. Thanks

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