restarting a airport from the commandline - of a non-mac We have a few airport's and an airport express here at my work, and I would like to bring them into my Nagios monitoring more closely. Right now they are only being monitored by ping. I would very much love to be able to ssh to it as we do to the other WAP's, so that I could monitor the users connected and maybe even some basic signal quality stuff, but other answers are getting me thinking that ssh just isn't an option for the Airports.

One thing I have found is a couple of posts referencing networksetup. From what I can tell it seems to give some degree of function not only for getting information out of the router, but also performing actions such as a restart. The one problem is - it's obviously a binary only available on the mac terminal.

I can't co-opt one of the few macbook pro's we have just to proxy requests to the Airports, and I'm not aware of a way to virtualize OSX. Does anyone know of a port of the networksetup command for some other distribution (if it was ubuntu it would be ++good)? Or perhaps an alternative solution to be able to get basic information from and perform basic actions on an airport (I really can't think of any actions needed other than the restart).

Edit: I just got momentarily excited when I saw that there was a airport-utils package - sadly it would appear that this does not support any command line options, it's GUI only.
You're asking a lot of different stuff here.

Here's the question I am going to try to answer:

"How can I bring my Airport devices into my Nagios monitoring more closely?"

OK so first of all, Nagios supports SNMP and (most?) Airport devices support SNMP.  So "all" you have to do is configure the Airport SNMP settings and then set up Nagios to ingest the data.

Unfortunately the current version of the Apple's Airport Utility (6.3.1) removed the interfaces to the SNMP settings in the Airport.  You can still download the old version (5.6.1) from Apple but the installer for the old version of the Airport Utility refuses to run on Mountain Lion! However it turns out that it is only the installer that is broken in ML!

Some crazy genius has written and made available an Automator workflow that works around this and allows you to install the old version of Airport Utility.  I just tried it and it worked.  Was then able to use it to set the SNMP settings of my Airport devices.

If this ends up working for you and you accept my answer, you should consider rewriting the question so that the question and the answer match.