For a while now I have been having the wifi that I have
setup in the house cut out, and the only fix has been a restart, well sometimes
it was "broken" for over a day and then just start working again. I thought
that someone may have been hacking it. But doing scans I could find no other
wifi in the area when it was "broken". This had been going on for a
couple of months and was starting to do my head in as there didn't seem to be consistent
cause. So the last time it did it, I put it down to a flaky wifi unit, it is a
couple of years old. So since I have become bit of an apple fan, and really
like the options on the Apple airport express, I went and got one. I really
like the idea of using the Iphone remote app and AirTunes to control music in the house.

So got home and plugged it in.... expecting setup to be Apple simple. Well it
was but it didnt work straight away. I couldn't get the bloody thing working.
No wifi connectivity. Bugger.... Then I had a brainwave. Perhaps there is some
wifi interference from something. But what?

Nothing new has been added, or changed..... cluck goes the old
brain. The baby monitor, we have a video one, and the little one sometimes
plays with the camera in the bedroom. Its one of those that have three channels
you can select from. So setting the camera setup to a different channel and wifi
started working.

Double bugger..... so after all these months it was the bloody wireless camera
messing with my wifi. So the inconsistent occurrences were due to when the
little one decided to play with the camera. I turned the camera off, and after
all my mucking around with the airport trying to get it to work I did a hard
reset and started again. Bingo everything worked first time.

Well I was happy that it was all working, So now I wanted to try the remote
speakers and itune / iphone remote features of the airport.

I could not get the iphone to show up in itunes as a remote on the PC, It would
on the MAC. Frustrations..... I checked Vistas  firewall settings and application settings. I
could not get it to work. Then while on the MAC I noticed that the MAC airport
was on. During my numerous tests to get the Airport express to work I must have
left it on, when I turned it off the iphone remote didn't work. Hmmm puzzling.

So after even more Googling I found a reference to make sure that the itunes
PC/MAC are on the same subnet as the iphone. But they should be have been, as I
have only one home network IP range and one DHCP server. But checking the
Iphone it was getting a different IP range that the LAN IP range. So I jumped
onto the Airport setup utility, yip sure enough it was dishing out DHCP address
in another subnet range. There is a little setting which turns this off and
make the Airport a bridge. Once that was selected and updated, the iphone
remotes started showing up in itunes on both the MAC and Vista PC.

The actual iPhone remote application and the controlling of
music and speakers is very slick and worked a charm once setup. After all the
trials which were all due to my environment I can full recommend the Airport
Express.

I ended up putting my older wifi unit back in the mix (since
it wasn?t faulty) as it had a larger range and used the airport in the lounge
hooked up to the stereo. So now i can fire up music on the lounge stereo with
the iphone and then use it as my whole house music remote...... very cool, Now
I need another airport express for the other rooms music.