Nighthawk access point setup failure

Hi all,

Following up on my last message, I have had some success ... MAYBE! (I'll find out in about 10 hours from now, see below.)

I decided to re-try the access point setup procedure in a completely different environment by bringing the EX7000 into my office, thus removing the Arris cablemodem/wi-fi-router and any rogue wi-fi actors in or near my house from the picture. There is no cablemodem here at the office, just a private 192.168.168 LAN gatewayed onto a bigger public LAN via a D-Link DIR-655 which supports both wired and wi-fi private LAN connections. I wired the EX7000 to the D-Link (via some intermediate switches). 

Initial power-up in my office was no more promising than at home -- again, the device-to-extender LED went green at the end of the EX7000 boot process before I even tried to connect to it from my Mac, just like it did at home. The manual says this should go green only AFTER you make the wi-fi connection from your client device.

However, and here's the big improvement, when I used the Mac network panel to connect to the newly advertised NETGEAR_EXT SSID at the office, I immediately got the Extender setup screen on my Mac as soon as the wi-fi connection was made (without even starting a web browser). This time, unlike my home experience, my Mac was assigned a 192.168.1 address. Curiously, mywifiext.net was still unreachable from the browser, but this time when I tried to connect to 192.168.1.250 through the browser it worked.

So, I went through the access point setup screens, and all seemed to go well (although it took a rather long time to save my settings to the device). At some point my Mac was booted from the wi-fi connection, probably when the EX7000 reconfigured itself, but I was able to quickly re-connect over one of the two wi-fi nets now advertised by the EX7000 post-reconfig. The only thing that failed was a final (maybe?) web browser page that could no longer be displayed due to the new IP address of the EX7000 -- I got the message "Safari can't open the page 192.168.1.250/IA_review_setting.htm because Safari cannot connect to the server 192.168.1.250". Beats me why Netgear would even try to display such a page given that the reconfiguration will change the EX7000's IP, but whatever. Hopefully there were no further steps to the access point configuration, though -- at least my Mac is still connected over one of the access point's new wi-fi nets and all seems normal.

Now, I just have to take this thing back home in about 10 hours and hope there's nothing peculiar to the access point settings configured at my office which will not translate to my home environment. I entered no such info myself during the config process (I only named the two wi-fi nets and set their passwords), but I suppose it's possible that the EX7000 may have grabbed other data all on its own from my office LAN (e.g., network number or gateway IP) and cached it away to break things when I move to another network. Any guesses on what might happen when I do that (or why I was not able to get this far at home last night, following the exact same procedure)?

Thanks,

Roger