Innards of the Beast
Someone's opened up the AxBS and explained some of its parts.
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Someone's opened up the AxBS and explained some of its parts.
In researching an article, I just received confirmation from MacSense that their AeroCard Universal Driver package will be updated as soon as two months from now to support Intersil-based 802.11g PC Cards for the Mac. Macsense will offer the driver on its own or as a package with a PC Card they will sell.
Intersil is no longer the dominant consumer product supplier: Apple and Linksys both chose Broadcom chips instead of Intersil. But because you're buying a card to use in any case, it's not really a downside. Intersil equipment will certainly be part of any Wi-Fi interoperability testing, and have a Wi-Fi seal when the program is ready to go in July.
Still waiting word from Belkin on when drivers will ship for their equipment, and from Macwireless for their plans. The real lacuna appears to be PCI: no current PCI wireless cards have Mac OS X drivers.
What I couldn't say yesterday is that Broadcom had shipped its firmware upgrade so that all of the vendors using Broadcom chips, including Apple, Linksys, and others, were able to release firmware upgrades by today.
The new specification brings Wi-Fi certification to the 802.11b part of the implementation, and brings the 802.11g draft up to the very latest version in front of the IEEE task group.
Reports are coming from all over that the new AxBS firmware has solved a number of problems that were aggravating people, and I have already found it easier to connect to and reconfigure the AxBS after the hassles I documented a few days ago.
The AirPort Extreme Base Station has new firmware. This coincides with something else I can't discuss at the moment, but is part of an ongoing effort by the chipmakers for draft G equipment to continually update until reaching a standard. (Thanks, Ed!)
Turns out that there are a number of people reporting problems with their AirPort Extreme Base Stations (which I have seen neatly abbreviated as XBS in a comment on this blog!). See for instance MacNet v2 which links to heated and detailed discussions on this problem on Apple's own discussion boards. It sounds like the problem might be focused on the $249 XBS which has a modem and antenna jack.
An AirPort repair site is reporting that people have told the author that if they bring back an XBS to an Apple Store, it's being replaced regardless of where it was purchased.
Could be hardware (early chipset problems), but more likely firmware. I haven't seen this much frustration among Apple users for hardware problems for quite some time. (Thanks to Mr. Barrett for the links.)
Apple's loaned me two AirPort Extreme Base Stations and a 12-inch PowerBook G4 with an AirPort Extreme Card for several print stories I'm working on, and I've had a chance to spend a few hours configuring them and talking to Apple tech support in troubleshooting problems.
To remind those of you without AirPort Extreme experience, this new product set uses a draft version of an in-progress IEEE engineering specification, 802.11g, that allows up to 54 Mbps raw transfers. Lots of questions remain about the viability of shipping draft-based equipment, and compatibility across devices from different companies at this stage. (For more on the emerging "g" issues, read our addendum.)
My first take is that there's something flaky with Extreme Base Station configuration capability. The reason I called tech support and spent an hour on the phone with an extremely capable top-tier techie was that after configuring both Base Stations from scratch, I was unable to read their configuration and change it following a reboot.
I currently have three access points (AP) on my office network carefully spaced out on channels 1, 6, and 11, the three nonoverlapping frequency ranges in the US that allow simultaneous use without interference. One AP is a graphite Base Station acting as a DHCP server. The second is a Linksys WAP11 in pure AP mode, just extending the network and connecting via Ethernet to the office backbone.
The third AP is a Linksys WAP54G (draft 802.11g Broadcom chips like Apple's) on loan from the company for compatibility testing. It had a few peculiarities in configuration itself, but I worked those out quickly, and was able to connect with a WPC54G -- a Linksys PC Card in a Sony Vaio laptop.
I was unable to force the PC Card to connect at 54 Mbps to the network when the WAP54G was just another AP on the network even though it was closest with the strongest signal, so I set up the WAP54G as a different network. This allows me to always force a 54 Mbps or best speed 802.11g connection. Effectively, I have two networks running: one at b speeds (11 Mbps) and one g speeds (54 Mbps). I wanted to add the Base Stations as "outposts" on the g network.
The AirPort Extreme Base Station comes with the new AirPort 3.0.1 software which has an updated AirPort Admin Utility program (Applications -> Utilities) that can handle the older AirPort Base Stations and the new Extreme units. Unlike the existing Admin software, there's a stripped down view meant for simpler, home installations, and a full-option view which allows detailed configuration much like the original Admin software with some addition options for the Extreme units.
Out of the box, I decided to configure an Extreme Base Station to act as a plain access point: leaving all features set to default and turning off Distribute IP Addresses, which is Apple's name for DHCP with optional NAT service.
Configuring from my Cube with an AirPort Card seemed to work fine, but after restarting the Base Station through the utility software, I was unable to connect to the unit and configure it. I was presented with an error that the software could not read the configuration file. Odd.
I tried a hard reset (hold down the Base Station's reset button for more than five seconds) and was able to reconnect with the factory defaults -- password is "public" -- and configure again. To the same results.
I figured I might have a faulty unit, so tried the other Base Station. Same problem. Called Apple's tech support. Since I'm press, I'm given a special tech support agreement number which I assume puts me through to top-tier tech support. The person who helped me for an hour was certainly incredibly knowledgeable.
We walked through a number of scenarios, but he started by telling me something odd: that if you put an Extreme Base Station into AP mode, disabling its DHCP server, that you would have to use a soft reset -- one second holding down the reset button -- to reconnect to it. A soft reset allows you to enter the password and some other information and force-load the existing configuration file.
This seemed strange, and I asked him several times to make sure that I was understanding it, and he was very clear: with Distribute IP Addresses turned off you cannot simply connect to a Base Station to change its configuration. However, soft reset might be designed for precisely this purpose. Still.
Because I could not connect to the configuration of either Base Station with the AirPort Card-enabled Cube after initially modifying the settings (with the Cube connected over the wired network or directly to the Base Station), the tech support fellow suggested that I use the 12-inch aluminum PowerBook G4. We discovered after some trial and error that the 12-inch unit had been shipped with AirPort 3.0.1 installed despite having an internal AirPort Extreme Card. Ok. I updated the software on that machine and rebooted.
After the 12-inch PowerBook was ready to go, I connected via AirPort to the Base Station, but the admin utility didn't spot the Extreme Base Station -- only the older graphite. Oddly, when I returned to the Cube, it could now connected and configure the Extreme Base Station! Very strange. The technician pointed out that the admin utility authenticated itself against the Base Station so that the Base Station temporarily cached the unique adapter address of the machine using the admin utility.
I suggested that switching to the PowerBook and back to the Cube might have cleared the state, and shouldn't the tech pass this back to Apple's system developers? He seemed uninterested in that, despite having no explanation of the behavior, and his otherwise excellent attitude.
Around this point, I got off the phone with technical support, and found continued inconsistent behavior. It seems clear that I cannot connect on two successive occasions to change configuration settings on an Extreme Base Station. I would like to point to some activity on my part that would explain this behavior, but it appears to be a kind of mismatch between the way in which the admin software talks to the Base Station and parses the configuration file from it.
(This is why SOAP/XML-RPC and similar protocols are excellent: instead of designing these proprietary closed methods of talking among peripherals, you use a standard transport made reliable reducing the problems that can occur, such as errors in transmission, while simultaneously opening up configuration to other software.)
I'm very unhappy with these configuration problems as it's unclear what I can do to improve them except wait for Apple to acknowledge problems and release a 3.0.x update to the firmware. I haven't had a chance yet to read through the extensive reports elsewhere about problems with AirPort Extreme, but I expect my story isn't unique, and I'll be trying to see if there's a common thread.
Coming up soon: bridging! More when I have that set up.
Nick Sayer has updated his instructions for hooking up Mac OS X to a Linksys WPC54G PC Card -- it's more complicated, but still possible.
Mr Barrett points out a list of printers that Apple notes support the USB printer sharing built into the AirPort Extreme Base Stations.
With Apple's rejiggering of their whole line-up, which Macs now support AirPort Extreme? The 12-inch (optional) and 17-inch (built-in) PowerBook G4; all new PowerMacs (single 1 GHz, dual 1.25 and 1.42 GHz); and the 17-inch iMac.
All of these models now also support an internal Bluetooth card which I have not yet seen. The 12-inch and 17-inch PowerBook G4s are the only model that have Bluetooth as a default feature, and the 17-inch is the only to sport AirPort Extreme in its base price.
Meetinghouse today announced that they will have a Mac OS X client by the end of the month that will support several authentication methods typically used to allow secure access for a client machine to a corporate network, including EAP-TTLS and PEAP, the two major methods backed by several companies for the former and Cisco and Microsoft for the latter.
Meetinghouse is stressing the educational market, which does use user logins extensively to control network access, but by making this client available, it extends the potential for Macs to be used in corporate networks -- especially networks where currently the lack of this kind of authentication means Macs can't be used.
Because the authentication happens above the network layers in which a wireless client associates with an access point, this authentication client can sit on top of that transaction instead of requiring other system changes. When and if WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) rolls out into Mac OS X, the client should also be able to take advantage of its superior encryption.
(WPA itself mandates the inclusion of the authentication part of the Meetinghouse client -- the part that negotiates with a server for access -- but Meetinghouse still will have a leg up because they are including the important pieces to encrypt the authentication transaction, rendering it secure from prying eyes, as WPA's default method is not.)
Apple today announced revisions to their iMac (LCD) and eMac (CRT) series, but only the new 17-inch iMac features support (which means you can buy cards for) Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme.
My Mac column this week in Seattle's major daily, The Seattle Times, focuses on AirPort Extreme: Apple Computer has a gift for names, and its high-speed revision to the AirPort wireless-networking system announced at last month's Macworld Expo has that hip, late '90s sensibility that makes you feel nostalgic and cutting edge at the same time: AirPort Extreme.