Remote Access to AirPort via SSH Port Forwarding

Wyatt — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 03:18:10 GMT

At home I use an AirPort Extreme as my firewall / access point / all of that, with a few ports forwarded through to access some services I have running on a small box at my house (among them SSH access to mange things). I ran into a situation while traveling where I wanted to make a couple of changes to the port forwarding configuration, but did not have the option to "Allow setup over WAN", and also have no desire to enable this. I've always had home routers that have some web GUI, so I just used SSH port forwarding and hit the web interface in my browser. As it turns out, it's not a lot more difficult with an AirPort Extreme, and still lets me leave the AirPort mangement port not to be exposed to the Internet. In my situation, I have my MacBook along and have a Linux machine at home that I access via SSH.

The AirPort Utility communicates with the AirPort via TCP port 5009. You can setup a port forward with something like:

ssh -L 5009:172.16.0.1:5009 home.mydomain.com

Of course, you'll want to change your internal IP address (172.16.0.1 in my case) to whatever the internal IP is for your AirPort and then change the SSH hostname to whatever you use. If you don't know the IP of your AirPort and have a fairly typical router, you can use 'route' on Linux or Mac systems to find the IP of your default gateway. For most people, this will be the IP of their AirPort.

Leave the above SSH session open in the background and launch the AirPort Utility on your Mac. When you launch the Utility, it will probably not find one (unless you happen to be on another network with an AirPort). Go to File -> Configure Other. In the pop-up, enter "localhost" in the Address field, and your password into the Password field. You should then be able to manage the AirPort via the utility. Note that as usual any changes you save to the AirPort will trigger a reboot and probably cut off the connection you established above. You will likely have to restart the tunnel after each time the box reboots.

Time Machine Backups from Airport Extreme

Wyatt — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 04:06:36 GMT

Hopefully Apple doesn't make up some way to disable this in the future, but it seems that despite claims elsewhere on the web, the latest Airport Extreme can be used with a USB hard drive to perform Time Machine backups. I've always heard great things about the Airport devices and really wanted to do backups over it, but I already had a larger USB hard drive, so a Time Capsule seemed like a bit of a waste. This worked with an Airport Extreme 802.11n 5th generation. My Macs are both Lion and Snow Leopard.

All you have to do is first plug the hard drive directory into your Mac, partition as desired and format filesystems as an HFS (Mac OS Extended). Then, plugin the drive and enable disk sharing on the Airport. After that's done, your Aiport should show up in Finder. Once you mount it, you can select it from the Time Machine settings (it will appear as a Time Capsule).

That's it! Glad I found out and wasn't deterred by what Apple says and is on their forums. The Airport has been amazing, video streaming is far smoother now unlike with the aging wireless router I was replacing. Definitely a recommended buy!

What a n00b! (airport)

Remote Access to AirPort via SSH Port Forwarding

Time Machine Backups from Airport Extreme