AirPort Blog

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.