I have several customers who use Apple Airport routers, and their routers will randomly change into Bridge mode and let their PCs in their home ask the MT on the tower for DHCP leases. Because I use static IPs in the DHCP server, the MT shows the DHCP lease as 'Busy'.

1. Why are these Apples switching from Router mode to Bridge mode? Clearly there is some sort of detection that the Airport is performing - and failing!
2. Is there any way to get the MT to talk to the Airport in such a way that the Airport will behave like a router and not a bridge?

Thanks.

TIM

A friend of mine has an Airport behind another router and it will force a popup on her apple with a warning that the router is double natted and the solution is bridge mode. She learned the hard way once not to listen to it. The airport must be detecting NAT from somewhere via some method and prompting the user to "fix it" by clicking change.

I have no idea what it looks for or how to tell it to shut up.

Quite frustrating - especially since the Airport is the only router readily available that does this nonsense. Linksys, Netgear, DLink, Belkin and the rest of the whole world seems to do just fine without this "feature"...

If there's a solution on the MT to keep the Airport at bay, please let me know!

Technically the device would have two ways to find out about "double NAT":
* Connect to a webserver and compare the returned IP to the one on the WAN interface
* Check whether the IP on the WAN interface is in a private subnet

From that you can gather what a solution would be.

It's also pretty obvious why it would check for that: Users are dumb.
Today it's nearly impossible to get a modem without router functions enabled and users don't care about what NAT is or even what a router is. So they will just plug the Airport in somewhere it fits...