I have disabled remote configuration on my Airport Extreme but was out of town and needed to add a new port to the router and forward it to an internal machine, made me scratch my head a bit. After some googling I found information on setting up an SSH tunnel to assist with this.

On my Macbook I ran the following command to set create the tunnel to my server on my home network. Simply substitute the Router_IP for the IP of your router and then of course change IP_Address_of_home_connection to the IP of your home connection or Dynamic Address (dyndns.org)

ssh -L 5009:Router_IP:5009 IP_Address_of_home_connection

Once you have established the connection via the terminal on your mac you can then bring up the Airport Utility and goto File->Configure other. Use 127.0.0.1 as the IP of the router and then add your router password. This should then connect (depending on your connection speed it may not be instant.