Airport Extreme 802.11n setup problems - solved

So ... the Airport Extreme 802.11n base station (mentioned last week) arrived safely. On the same day I received a new LaCie Porsche Design 320GB USB hard disk (don't laugh, this drive had the best dollars to gigabytes ratio out of all the major vendors' offerings). I was too busy to do anything with the equipment for the first few days but eventually found an hour to set it all up. Little did I know how much more time I would need ...

A little background first. My current setup consists of an Airport Express in my living room connected to ADSL and a stereo. I have a Canon MP750 multifunction printer but it's upstairs in the study meaning I have to take my MacBook Pro upstairs to print anything. I wanted to connect the printer wirelessly, but without running very long cables from the living room to the study. Also due to rapidly shrinking free hard disk space on my laptop I have lately been wanting to install a network hard drive, so when the Airport Extreme (from now on referred to as AEN) was announced it looked like just the thing since it would also solve my printer problem. My plan was to connect the AEN to the printer and a USB hard drive, while continuing to use the Express downstairs for the ADSL and stereo.


Connecting all the appropriate cables was very simple - just a power cord each for the hard drive and the AEN and a USB cable between them. Inserted the CD that comes with the AEN and installed the software. Beyond this point I was expecting a mostly-automated configuration via Airport Utility which 'just worked'. Unfortunately Airport Utility assumes you are setting up a new network and doesn't seem to allow for joining an existing one. This meant I had to configure it manually...

Two days later, and many boring hours trawling the internet, I am finally done. It's been a long and arduous journey! And not at all what I've come to expect from Apple gear. What follows is a brief description of the problems I encountered.

The actual setup
You might recall that I wanted to keep my Airport Express in its current role and add the new AEN to connect the printer and hard drive. Now I foolishly assumed this meant I should use the AEN to extend my existing network and wasted a couple of already-scarce hours troubleshooting the faulty setup. Once I finally realised that I needed to use a WDS network and set the Express to WDS Main mode and the AEN to WDS Remote mode things started to look up - a little. While both Airport units were visible on the same network, I couldn't see my hard drive. After more research on the Apple 802.11n forums I came across several recommendations to reformat the hard drive to fix non-visible drive issues. Following this advice I connected the drive directly to one of my Mac's USB ports and formatted it as Mac OS X Extended (not journalled) and - Eureka! - the drive was now visible in Airport Disk Utility and could be mounted with the name 'AirDisk'. The light on the AEN was still flashing orange, but I didn't care. Success! Or so I thought ...

Teething problems
One of the first things I did was to start copying my iTunes library to the newly mounted AirDisk. This was something I wanted to do anyway to free up some space on my laptop hard disk and I thought I could get a feel of the AirDisk's speed while copying many gigabytes of data. Within the first few minutes I knew what the speed felt like - it was pretty slow. Don't get me wrong - I knew I only had an 802.11g Mac but my transfer speed was only around 3.1 MB/sec, nothing like the almost 7 MB/sec which 54Mbps 802.11g should be capable of. Nevertheless I left it churning away and left it for an hour or two. However when I returned I found a dialog box saying the AirDisk had disconnected, and my file copy had been aborted.

Things went downhill from this point. Now nothing seemed to work. :( I couldn't re-mount the AirDisk even though I could see it with Airport Disk Utility. The AEN was behaving extremely erratically, disappearing from the Airport Utility panel before mysteriously reappearing some time later. I could reboot everything and the network would seem to work but the AirDisk was still not mountable. Then 10 minutes later the network would fall apart again. It was all quite annoying.

After much head-scratching, I eventually figured out that the network dropping out after a few minutes was the sort of thing that would happen if two devices on the same network are both acting as DHCP servers. Searching through the Internet panel of the AEN configuration screens I finally noticed a drop box to disable 'internet sharing' and activate 'bridge mode'. Bingo! This solved the dropped network issues, AND it turned the AEN light to a solid green.


But my AirDisk was still not working. At this point I began wondering if the drive had suffered some kind of catastrophic failure in its first day of use.

It eventually occurred to me to disconnect the AirDisk from the AEN and reconnect it to my laptop. The only reason I didn't do this earlier was the fact that I had only formatted the drive a couple of hours earlier! But once I connected the drive, lo and behold, nothing. It didn't show up in the Finder. I proceeded to check the drive with Disk Utility and immediately discovered the problem:

This 'invalid sibling link' could not be fixed by Disk Utility. I looked it up on Google but found precious little relevant information. Luckily the mighty DiskWarrior was up to the challenge and was able to fix the problem. One directory rebuild later, and the AirDisk was magically mounted on the Mac's desktop! I disconnected it from the Mac and plugged it back into the AEN via a USB hub. I remounted it wirelessly using Airport Disk Utility and everything now seems to be hunky-dory. Hopefully I'm not tempting fate by saying that. Watch this space.

The Printer
Getting the printer to work was pretty straightforward. Trying to print to my old printer profile resulted in a 'printer not found' error, but simply re-selecting my printer in the 'Bonjour' submenu of the print dialog box created a new working profile. I made that my default profile before deleting the old one. Job done. (Although my printer is a multifunction I don't expect scanning to work wirelessly and haven't bothered to test it).

Results
Well, I finally have the exact setup I was hoping for. My Airport Express is connected to the living room stereo and AirTunes works flawlessly. The Express is also sharing the ADSL signal. The AEN is upstairs connected to an unpowered USB hub which is in turn connected to my printer and the new hard drive. Everything is working, and I don't have any cables running through my walls! I'm very pleased. One thing I would mention to anyone contemplating this is that I took the opportunity to rearrange my iTunes library and copied 15GB of music to the AirDisk before adding it all to iTunes (iTunes was not set to copy files and not to keep the library organised). Since the files wouldn't be moved I figured that adding them to the library wouldn't take too long. Oh boy was I wrong about that - determining gapless playback over 802.11g for 15GB of music took around 14 hours! It all worked without dropping any connections though, so hopefully that's a good stress test of the AirDisk. One thing I have noticed is that the hard drive doesn't seem to spin down, and although it doesn't bother me this is something I would expect to be addressed by a firmware update. Some people claim that not spinning down reduces the life of the hard drive but - given that modern drives have a MTBF measured in hundreds of thousands of hours - I'm not one of them.

Despite complaining about the speed I should add that the system is still highly usable. iTunes plays over the 802.11g network just fine. Movies and music videos seem to play without problems. I am still experimenting with iPhoto but others have reported success. I've also copied a lot of stock photography to the AirDisk and despite a slight pause while the custom icons are displayed the responsiveness is excellent. I have also set up nightly scripts to backup important documents to a folder on the AirDisk. As a laptop user I find the convenience to be well worth the price of the hardware. Not to mention freeing up dozens of gigabytes on my already crammed laptop hard drive.

Conclusions
This is a great product with excellent benefits for us laptop-as-sole-computer types who don't want to be constantly connecting and disconnecting wires. Having said that however the actual product has a distinct 'version 1.0' feeling to it. I don't consider my single Airport Express network to be particularly unusual but adding the AEN to it was unreasonably difficult. Airport Utility's automatic configuration needs to be significantly improved for this device to be truly accessible to your average consumer. Nevertheless, I still love it :D

Airport Extreme Base Station coming! Announced by SMS?

Woke up this morning to find an email from Apple informing me that my new Airport Base Station has been dispatched! Excellent news - the 320GB USB drive I plan on using with it is also arriving today. One strange thing, I also received an SMS message from Apple with the announcement! This is a first for me, I wonder when they started doing that?