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PreSale Question Re Nighthawk Router & Extender

chuckbutler
Aspirant

PreSale Question Re Nighthawk Router & Extender

Hi.

 

Our small business is about to retire our aging Apple Airports, and I'm considering Netgear Nighthawk as a solution. Before purchashing, however, I want to make sure that Nighthawk will meet our needs, specifically regarding two issues.

 

1. We'll be using the router to connect wired and wireless clients, and from what I can tell the Nighthawk will be a huge upgrade over our aging Airports. But we have one computer that we use as an FTP server, and I need to be sure that the Nighthawk can be configured so that this will be accessible to remote clients via the internet as well as to the engineers on our in-house LAN. We currently accomplish this by assigning a static IP address to our Airport router, and a manually-assigned IP DHCP address to the FTP server. There is then a setting in the Airport control software called "Enable default host at" followed by a field to enter the FTP server's IP address. This tells the airport to route any traffic to our static IP directly to the FTP server, while also allowing computers on our internal wired and wirless network to access the server via its DHCP address.

 

Can the Nighthawk AX12 be configured to permit this, and if so, how?

 

2. Our other issue is WiFi coverage. Although we're only about 2,000 square feet, our facility has an unusual, asymmetrical floorplan, with rooms separated by corridors and *very* think walls. The server room, where the router will be located, is in the most remote area of the facility. We're currently running a second Airport, placed in a more central location and connected to our Airport router via ethernet, to distrubute WiFi (in Bridge mode). I suspect that the AX12 will have trouble supplying WiFi throughout our facility from the server room, so I'm thinking of adding the EAX80 Range Extender to replace our WiFi Airport. But I notice that the EAX80 is designed to connect to the AX12 by a dedicated wireless channel, and I'm concerned that this connection my not be stable given our facilitiy's layout and construction. I notice that the EAX80 includes several ethernet ports, so I'm wondering if it can be connected to the AX12 via ethernet instead.

 

Thanks in advance for any comments or suggestions.

Model: RAX120|Nighthawk AX12 12-Stream WiFi Router
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chuckbutler
Aspirant

Re: PreSale Question Re Nighthawk Router & Extender

To answer my own questions:

 

1. Yes, there are a couple of different ways to permit access to a server. I chose the DMZ method (same as I was using with Airport), and it's working perfectly.

 

2. As I suspected, the wireless signal from the extender to router was weak. But I was able to connect them via ethernet and set up the extender in "Access Point" mode. The setup was a bit tricky as the documentation isn't as clear as it could be, but I was able to get it working.

 

So my only disappointment is that no one from the "Netgear Community" chimed in with a response. Fortunately I was able to find answers by downloading the relevant documentation prior to making my purchase, but it leaves me a bit worried about whether I will be able to get assistance should I encounter some issue that's not covered in the docs.

 

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