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February 1, 2012|Donn Felker

Airport Extreme and Brother 2170w Setup

Today I got a new Apple Airport Extreme router / base station. I have a Brother 2170w wireless printer (basically set it up, and you can print wirelessly all over your office or house or wherever). Its freaking great. I really think every office should have one of these lying around. Its simply awesome.

Previously I had a Cisco router that I used, but it crapped out. However, setting it up with this router was easy. I followed the instructions and everything was golden. Not with the Airport Extreme … I could not get it set up. I followed ALL the manual instructions and read the quick start and then the manual and tried three different config utilities. Unfortunately none of those worked. It wasn’t until I perused the Apple Forums and found others having the same issue. Someone by the name of Peter T. posted a solution (just so you know that i’m not taking credit for this). However, its important enough for me that i need to re-write it down and store it here with a good URL slug so that its easy to find for others on Google as well as for myself for later.

How to connect your 2170w to an Airport Extreme

  1. Open Airport Utility. Click “Manual Setup”.
  2. Select “Add wireless clients …” from Base Station drop-down menu
  3. In Wireless Setup Utility: Select “Allow client by PIN” and click “Continue”
  4. Push HL-2170W’s reset button(between Ethernet and USB ports) with pen or paper clip for 3 seconds or so until yellow toner light flashes. The Brother will print a PIN number. (Yellow light will continue to flash as it searches for a network)
  5. In Wireless Setup Utility enter PIN number and click “Continue”
  6. After a minute or so Airport should recognize the Brother; press “Done”
  7. Open “Print and Fax”,and click “+” to add printer. HL-2170 will show in the Printer options and you should be good to go.

I did have an issue when I got to step 5 and the Airport Utility could not find the device and it errored out. I completely quit out of the Airport Utility and then restarted the Airport Utility and performed the same steps (this time much quicker because I knew what I was doing). Upon doing so, it worked. Please note, when you get to step 6 … it does take a minute (or two) for the Airport Extreme and the printer to communicate, so don’t worry, something is happening.

Now… back to what I was doing before … 🙂