Verizon FIOS, AirPort Extreme, and Ken

Having just moved into my new apartment in Providence, Rhode Island, I was elated to discover that Verizon FIOS was an available option for my television and internet needs. If you’ve never heard of FIOS, it’s essentially a fiber optic cable fed directly into your home capable of providing ludicrous speeds and outstanding response time.

Needless to say I opted for their fasted package. 35Mb Up/Down. This is my result:

This is my result
Verizon FIOS – Speedtest.net results

Now we’re cooking with lasers! So far so good… but after getting everything hooked up and configured, there were a few random bits that weren’t working; namely MobileMe, Back to my Mac, and Synergy.

Thanks to Ken Yegelski’s really awesome blog post over at his blog Just One Point of View, I was up and running in a snap. His trick involved diving into the modem/router combo that Verizon provides you, and configuring the IP address range to accomodate for the 10.0.x.x IP’s that OSX is used to, and putting the AirPort Extreme into Bridge Mode.

Dead simple, and almost totally effective.

The only thread left hanging for me, is Synergy. Synergy is software installed on multiple machines that run over a network in a client/server fashion, allowing to share a keyboard and a mouse with each other. Previous to having FIOS, everything worked fine; now, my keyboard doesn’t share. Mouse works fine, just no keyboard.

So consider this post a giant thanks and hat-tip to Ken, and a signal flare for experience on configuring Synergy/SynergyKM between OSX and Windows7.