Mavericks Server Part 38: Airport Adminstration

21/08/14 07:36 Filed in: Technology

For those of you with an Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS), OS X Server includes built in support to manage your AEBS making it more convenient to forward ports and control who can logon to your wireless network. One of the biggest issues we all face when running a server is the issue of opening ports. If you want to connect to any of the services on your server while you are away, you need to make sure you have opened ports in your router so you don’t get blocked from access. Routers function as physical firewalls keeping traffic from going in and out of your local network. To allow certain services to have access to the outside world you have to authorize that access by opening doors to the outside world. Those door are called ports. Typically you would have to go into your router software, look up the ports you need to forward for the services you want to use, manually enter those ports to be forwarded in your router’s software and then reboot your router for those changes to take place.

Using the service in OS X Server with an AEBS, Server automatically enters the ports you need for the services you entered. It will also open those ports without the need to restart your router so no one loses internet service and turning services on and off becomes seamless. It really is a great feature of OS X Server and is another reason to consider using an Apple router.

Not only does OS X Server control the opening and closing of ports, it also has a built in RADIUS service. RADIUS stands for Remote Authentication Dial In User Service. This basically means that instead of having your users log onto your wireless network with a general SSID and general password, they log in with their Network Accounts that you set up on your server. So the AEBS is using your Open Directory to determine whether someone is allowed to log onto your network or not. This adds an additional layer of security to your network and is especially useful in organizations where they have users coming and going and those users having the SSID and password necessitates constantly changing the password.

In this screencast I cover how to use the service built into OS X Server to manage your AEBS. I cover how to add new ports to the service for other applications that may need ports opened. I also cover how to set up and use the RADIUS service and talk about an application called Admin Tool Radius that can help you manage multiple RADIUS Networks and manually set up RADIUS if you are not using OS X Server for that service.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them here or on my Youtube Channel.

Tags: Tutorials, Apple, Mac OSX, Server, Network