Finally, after much anguish and a series of angry phone calls to RCN, I have internet in my apartment. Woohoo! Sadly, I can’t make the new Airport Express I bought from Apple work, but that shouldn’t concern you. As far as you’re concerned, I have no excuse for bad blogging. This is the Amateur Gourmet, reporting for duty. Fire at will, captain.
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All you should have to do is plug the DSL/Cable modem into the Express, make sure your computer is set to AirPort & DHCP in the network prefs, and you should be golden. Maybe you could elaborate on the problem and some of us nerdy readers can help.
Brian W, thanks for your offer. Basically I think the hardware situation is fine: I plugged the ethernet into the Express and it turned green; all well and good. But I ran the disc on my computer, followed all the instructions, chose to password protect my network and when it concluded the wireless didn’t work. It sees the network on the airport tab (I named the network “Adam’s Airport Express”) but when I click it I can’t go on the internet wirelessly. Then I had the bright idea of toggling with the IP address in the airport settings and I copied and pasted all the info from when I just have the ethernet plugged in into the Airport information screen. Does that make any sense? In any case, it still didn’t work. Now I have no idea what’s happening. Please help!
Oh, and another thing: I can’t send e-mail, even when plugged into the network. Why can’t I send e-mail? Are these problems interconnected? Please help. Thank you.
RCN (and most ISPs in New York that I know of) blocks the use of other SMTP servers (Send Mail… something… something. Yeah) than their own on port 25. You have to find out if your domain host has either 1. another port you can use (many use 2525 — you just have to go into your email preferences and look for the SMTP stuff and put 2525 in there) or 2. a “relay server” you can use instead (my host, Pair, has relay.pair.com; I imagine other hosts have something similar).
As for your Airport issues… first I would try turning off the password, just to see if you can get online without it. I would make sure the TCP/IP tab in the Network System Preferences is set to DHCP, and take out the stuff you put in there to see if it can auto-set itself once you have no password requirement. Then make sure you have selected Adam’s Airport Express in the menubar (there’s a little signal strength button there that looks like a triangle with a bunch of black bars in it).
It’s hard to diagnose without being there but maybe some of this will help!
I just found your site by googling ‘RCN port 25 block’ … you saved my sanity!
I have been having trouble with sending mail since RCN installation 3 weeks ago. 9 hours of tech support phone calls, 5 engineer-level support tickets, and a service call and no one could figure out why port 25 was completely blocked on my connection. Both Mac and PC (laptop and a tower) different mail programs… all the same error message. I just used the pair server brian w suggested and FINALLY sent outgoing mail. Is that relay a legitimate one, or am I at risk of it being shut down on me in the future? I just can’t bear the thought of talking to the tech robots at RCN one more time…