OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Apple Airport ProxySTA

The content of this topic has been archived on 30 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

Hi there,

I'm posting this here – it's not (or maybe it is?) not directly related to OpenWRT but I believe if someone knows anything about it – this might be the right spot.

I'm curious what Apple is doing in their Airport Express WiFi Base-Stations. They offer something called "ProxySTA" or "ProxyStation".

The "Magic" is: no WDS and it connects to every Wifi ap chipset out there. The Box behaves as a simple Wifi-Client. But… You can plug Ethernet-Devices into it's ethernet port and even a Switch with more devices. Retrieving DHCP-Leases (from the network dhcp) is limited to 4 devices, there is no known limit if static IPs are used.

This is not working as a cheap bridge. Every device connected to the Ethernet Port keeps it's own MAC. And the whole thing works transparent (no additional hop added) and every device can talk to every device. There is no configuration necessary.

Apple decided to kill the Airports but this functionality was the only reason to use these things. I'm not aware of any other device out there offering such functionality.

Sadly, the whole thing is not documented by Apple but 802.11n is the minimum requirement on the Airports.

Does anybody know what they are doing there?

(Last edited by pbk on 9 Aug 2017, 15:46)

Is it making multiple connections to the AP?  You could use Wireshark or similar to see what goes out over the air.

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