I recently moved to a new apartment, and as part of the switch, I decided to use Apple's Airport Express and Airport Extreme line of 802.11b/g wireless access points as my network backbone. True to Apple's form, they were a snap to set up, but I was quite surprised to find out just how much of a punch they really pack. Read on for more details...

In case you haven't been paying attention to the news from Cupertino, Airport Express is Apple's latest 802.11b/g access point. However, as I found out after using it, it is much more than just an access point. Besides the obvious sharing of a USB printer and streaming music via Airtunes to your home stereo, both the Airport Express and the Airport Extreme are full featured Wireless Access Points/Routers and support a broad range of security protocols, including WEP, WPA, and RADIUS. Add to that things a geek would want (support for sending access point logs to another machine, SNMP, remote configuration, port forwarding, MAC ACL's, and more) and you have two access points that are not just for mere mortals, but for super geeks as well. I have yet to use some of the more esoteric features (for example, RADIUS authentication/encryption), but I plan to start using them in the next few weeks. I'll keep you posted on how things turn out.