The Apple Airport base station is an incredible value. With it you get a firewall, a DHCP server and a wireless LAN base station. Until Lucent's Residential Gateway starts shipping, there really is nothing comparable to Airport on the market. Unfortunately for non-Apple users, the Airport is not easily adaptable for non-apple environments. In the ideal situation you can take the Airport base station out of the box, plug it into your high speed cable or DSL modem, and connect to any computer with an 802.11 wireless card using DHCP. However, if it doesn't work at first try or you want to change any of the default settings then you are out of luck. Without an Apple computer you can't use any of the configuration utilities. The best way to use Airport is with Apple computers but if you are not fortunate enough to own an Apple then there are alternatives. There is an excellent Java utility on Sun's web site that mimics the Airport Base Station configuration utility. Using this utility you can set the Airport Base station wireless network settings, IP address, and DHCP server address range. (Note that encryption will not work unless you are using Apple computers on your wireless network.) We were able to configure the base station to connect to our existing LAN with a fixed IP address and set the DHCP server to connect wireless computers on the same LAN segment. Once we got the hang of it everything worked great. However, a minor glitch occurred when we tried to reset the base station. We had to borrow a friend's PowerMAC G4 in order to reload the base station software. Oh well, its never easy.

If you feel brave enough to attempt it (really, it's not that bad) then the following steps should get you up and running using Windows wireless computers and an Airport base station.

• In order to configure and alter the settings of an Apple AirPort Base Station on a PC (Windows or Unix), two programs are required. The first program, v1.3 of the Java Runtime Environment, allows you to run configuration program. It can be downloaded here:
  http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/
  (Note: The configuration software should run on version 1.18, but I was unable to get it to run. v1.3 associates all .jar files with the runtime environment, allowing you to double click on it in Windows and not have to enter DOS.)
  The runtime environment should be installed prior to running the configuration software.
  
  
• The second program, the Java-based configuration emulator, can be downloaded here:
  http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/sevy/airport/#Configurator
  
  
• After the emulator has been installed, simply double click on the .jar file (e.g. AirportBaseStationConfig.jar) to run the software.
  
  

Those were pretty much the steps I took to configure the base station. The emulator is fairly easy to understand and requires no explanation.