In an effort to wean my family off of my computer support as I leave for college, I'm currently upgrading all of our computers and computer network to run as smoothly as possible without my help. This upgrade consists of a rewritten backup plan, and replacing an old Airport Extreme with a brand new Time Capsule to which all the computers in the house are going to back up via Time Machine.

I received the 2TB Time Capsule today, and hurried to replace our old Airport Extreme, which has served us well for the last several years. However, after replicating all of the old settings from the Airport Extreme on the Time Capsule, its light remained a disappointing amber, and there was no internet connection to be found. I fiddled with the settings all afternoon (turning DHCP on and off, manually applying the IP Address and DNS settings that the old router had, turning NAT on and off, and playing with everything, pretty much), but to no avail. The farthest I got was setting the IP address of the Time Capsule manually (which, fortunately, allowed the light to shine a cheerful green), but my computer still could not connect to the Internet (it is receiving its connection via ethernet hooked up to the Time Capsule directly).

Connecting the Airport Extreme back in allows everything to work fine (it receives an IP Address with no problems when configured via DHCP and public IP sharing—this is how I am posting right now), but these same settings prevent the Time Capsule from working (the Time Capsule simply cannot receive an IP Address when set to DHCP, or anything else).

Any known reason for this to be happening? I will gladly post as many settings as necessary (though I think I mostly covered what's important here), and although I am definitely computer savvy, networking is not my strong spot, so hopefully, someone can help me.