I moved house recently and, as often happens, the new place is a bit bigger than the old. In addition, the change in layout meant that our work area was no longer physically close the incoming phone line and hence the ADSL. This resulted in a few challenges in terms of our existing wireless network configuration, and brought about the perfect opportunity to buy some new shiny Apple gear. Cue: the new Apple AirPort Extreme.
I’d previously been using a pair of AirPort Expresses, with one as the main base station and the other being used to extend the range of the first. As the layout of the new place isn’t so compact, I just needed to push the range out further, whilst still keeping one of the Express base stations in our office to make use of AirTunes.
So today I popped along to St Steve’s Cathedral on Regent Street and picked up (which is a casual phrase implying purchase) a new base station. I got the new Airport Extreme home and set it up. The new software is excellent, although transitioning from the existing configuration took some figuring out.
The way it used to work was that you’d set the first base station up as normal. You’d then add the second by specifying the same network name and checking a box that said something along the lines of using this one to extend an existing network, and you were done.
Now it’s a lot more comprehensive. Firstly, Apple have adopted the WDS (wireless distribution system) nomenclature with its Main, Remote and Relay base stations. It’s all rather more formal, and each base station acting as a ‘main’ or ‘relay’ needs to hold a list of MAC addresses of base stations that are allowed to act as relays or remotes for it. This has to be reciprocated, with each relay or remote base station specifying the MAC address of the base it should look to for a signal.
All seems very robust, logical and more secure than the previous system, but moving from one to the other without particular knowledge of how WDS formally works resorted in a good few minutes of needing to RTFM.
Once I’d got it figured out though, it seems to work nicely. Huzzah! The Extreme base station is a lovely, lovely thing. I hooked a printer up to it and It Just Worked, which was nice. The printer showed up via Bonjour and prints quickly (a stark contrast to the Belkin wireless print server I was using before).
So now I have the Extreme hooked up next to the ADSL router down in our server room. Almost directly up on the first floor is our office, which has an Express repeating the signal and pumping iTunes into the hifi.
Then in the spare room at the back of the house I have another Express repeating the signal to complete the coverage. This will hopefully also prove useful when we have guests to stay – even if they can’t get on the wireless, the Express has an ethernet port that will get them up and running. (Yes Mike and your awkward Linux wireless drivers, I mean you).
The other feature I’m really interested in is the USB disk sharing capability. We have a local linux server with RAID and samba shares which does us well for network storage, but I get the feeling that having the option of a dedicated Mac OS formatted drive shared on the network could be really handy. Especially with the small person using her Mac a lot more for school work and recreation. Plus, you know, it’s shiny.
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I (possibly less casually) picked one up recently as our old d-link router had started to require more attention than I cared to give (restarting it once an hour was annoying enough during the day, but it killed any chance of leaving downloads running overnight), and have been similarly pleased with it.
I have a USB hub sitting next to it, and as soon as I work out how to free up an outlet, there’ll be a hard drive running through it. When I’ve played with it a little the disk sharing has been just as easy to work with as the printer.
I’ll be getting one on Thursday. The USB port is the kicker. I was using an old iMac to back-up my laptop over my network, but a hard drive plugged into the Airport should be kinder to my electricity bill.
Hi, if you have either a 1st gen MacBook or MacBookPro then you can take full advantage of the Airport Extreme’s 802.11n speed by upgrading the internal Airport card:
How to Upgrade a Core Duo-based MacBook to Support WiFi:802.11n
I bought one a few weeks back specifically for the Airport Disk feature. It works beautifully, and means my backups happen daily without me having to go and plug in to the disk physically (which, you know, is just always too easy to put off doing). I didn’t manage to get Time Machine to recognise the disk under Leopard, but I suspect this is just a problem with the particular beta install I’m running. I’ll try it again with the more up-to-date version soon.
I cared to give (restarting it once an hour was annoying enough during the day, but it killed any chance of leaving downloads running overnight), and have been similarly pleased with it