Well, this is sure confusing, I'm trying to get an older Snow Base Airport (not the Airport Extreme) to work right. Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5 comes with a new Airport Utility v5.2 to manage the Airport Extreme but not with the older Airports (code named Snow Base). In fact, this utility is really hard to find it is in /Applications/Utility/Airport Utility, but won't find old wifi Airports. Instead, Larry R. says you have to for:
Tiger 10.1
Download the old AirPort Admin Utility Version 4.2. This is impossible to find efficiently on the Apple site, but you get it at http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airport42formacosx1033.html and you download AirPortSW42.dmg. Then you install it manually. Double click on the .DMG which mounts the file. Click on AirPortSW.pkg and select Show Package Contents. Go to the Contents folder. Double click on Archive.pax.gz which extracts an Archive.pax and an Archive Folder. Inside the Archive foldker look for Applications/Utilities and copy out the AirPort Admin Utility that is there. Don't just copy to the Utilities folder, but rename it to something like "Airport Utility v4.2" This doesn't work with Leopard however
Leopard 10.2
You have to run the Windows version of Admin Utility 4.2 (so you need Parallels) and this seems to work.
iStumbler, MacStumbler and Kismac
Debugging this stuff is easy for me on the PC as I know the tools, but on the Mac, life is different. First, you need iStumbler which is an open source tool that lets you discover what is on your network. Like Network Stumbler in Windows land. iStumbler only works against open networks, while Kismac sees invisible networks and will test encryption of WEP, WPA variety to make sure the passwords are good enough. Macstumbler is an older version if iStumbler from 2003.
