If you are under OSX Lion and onward you will notice that the Aiport Utility does not allow you to enable SNMP, along with a bunch of other options that may have been useful to you. Do not worry, the settings are there but they are just hidden by the dumbed-down interface. Just load Snow Leopard and use the Aiport Utility in Snow Leopard to enable SNMP.

To set-up SNMP on the machine quarrying the device:

1. The foremost thing to do is to enable SNMP on the Aiport.
2. On Debian-like systems, issue: aptitude install snmp snmp-mibs-downloader which will install SNMP along with the most vital MIBs.
3. Download the AIRPORT-BASESTATION-3-MIB.txt file (local mirror available) and place it in /usr/share/snmp/mibs.

You can now, for example, walk the entire tree of the Airport machine:

snmpwalk -v1 -c public 192.168.0.1 -m AIRPORT-BASESTATION-3-MIB

where:

• 192.168.0.1 - is the IP address of the Airport station.

Consider a scenario where you have an Airport device that routes all the traffic to clients behind the Airport. You may need to retrieve the real IP address that the Airport currently has leased from your ISP.

Provided you have installed the necessary SNMP tools as mentioned in the previous section of this page, the following bash command:

snmpwalk -v1 -c public 192.168.0.1 -m AIRPORT-BASESTATION-3-MIB  RFC1213-MIB::ipAdEntAddr | head -1 | awk '{ print $4 }'

where:

• 192.168.0.1 is the IP address on your local network of the Airport device

should retrieve the external IP address of the Airport device.