Using an AirPort Base Station as a router: a follow-up

Regarding our report yesterday on using an AirPort Base Station as a router: Several readers wrote to confirm success here, while an almost equal number complained that doing this resulted either in a very slow connection or frequent dropped connections. Kristin Green raises a concern: "It's true that the AirPort works great to share a cable modem connection in every way that you mentioned but not with an existing hub. Where would you connect the hub if the cable modem is plugged in to the AirPort's only Ethernet port? If the cable modem is plugged directly into the hub, any security protection afforded by going through the Base Station is lost." Peter MacLaren adds: "One restriction with the implementation of the AirPort 1.1, when used as a router, is that it apparently does not support IPSEC sessions used by some secure tunneling apps, often used for example for securely accessing corporate networks over the public internet. This restriction is also true of some other consumer grade home routers for sharing a single IP address. However, IPNetRouter (the software on which the Software Base Station for AirPort is based) does support IPSEC when run directly on a Mac." [See this MacFixIt Forums thread for more on AirPort.]