802.11n upgrade to Airport Express makes WDS a whole lot simpler

If I had to pick one feature of the Airport base station that makes me absolutely tear my hair out every time, that feature would be WDS. Getting a wireless network extended across multiple base stations with no wired interconnect is dark magic, and it seems like it never works the same way twice; it's always a mystery blend of MAC address input, switching between encryption modes, hard restarts, matching security settings and swearing. When I had to link up an Airport Extreme with two Airport Express units last week, I resigned myself to a long afternoon of trying to tame the user-hostile.

This time, though, it was different -- thanks to the power of N. 802.11n, now supported on both the Extreme and Express models, provides a remarkably easier WDS setup than earlier protocols. Rather than having to set the MAC addresses of the remote base stations and restart in sequence, on an all-n setup you just check the "Allow this network to be extended" on the master, and choose "Extend a wireless network" on the remotes. Easy as can be, and compared to the old way it's a big relief.