Part of moving into the new house off course involves setting up the wired and wireless network for the home. Since I have both an Apple AirPort Extreme and an Airport Express, and since the house is too big for the wireless network from one to cover all of it, I wanted to use the latter to extend the formers wifi. I’ve struggled with this previously and failed.

This time I decided not to quit until it worked. There’s just no way this can’t be done, right?

After some googling I found a webpage that helped me on the way, Airport Express as an extender. (Apple.com).

The way to do it is to connect a Cat5e/Cat6 wire between one of the ports of the Extreme and the port¹ of the Express. So far, so good.

Then, and here’s the catch, you setup the Extreme as a wifi access point. Once it’s up and running you setup the Express and the important thing is to not set it up as an extension of an existing network. Instead you should set it up as a new network, give it a unique device name and then use the same network name and password as you did on the Extreme. Finally you set the Express to work in bridge mode.²

Is you do these steps it should work. Yay!