I have purchased three Airport Extreme routers. I have a cable modem in one room that currently feeds into our primary router (which I want to replace with an Extreme), which feeds into a switch, which then distributes Internet and LAN services over ethernet via CAT5 to an office upstairs and another office a few rooms over. (The walls in our building are thick, so I can't do a purely wireless mesh.)
What I want is basically for one Extreme (the one next to the cable modem) to be my primary router and DHCP server, and the other two to be access points extending the primary network.
I tried using the Airport Utility to set it up following their instructions to extend a network, however, it seems that it was trying to do so wirelessly, not through the ethernet cables I had plugged into the Extremes. As a result, the two access point Extremes kept losing their connections to the primary Extreme.
How can I get this setup to work the way I want it to?
Best Answer
I believe the "extend wireless" option is for extending the wireless using wireless :-)
When extending over cable, Apple seem instead to call it "Roaming type network". So reset your units and start over.
Connect each unit using cable and create a wireless network on each one using exactly the same SSID, encryption, password etc. The only special one would be the to-be router, with which you should start. Proceed when it is working exactly as planned.
This is where I looked to realize this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4799778