Better AirPort Management Software; New AirPort Software, Firmware
Apple released a tool today to make LAN managers -- or even those of us with two or three Base Stations -- leap with joy: AirPort Management Tools 1.0. The AirPort Management Utility provides a way to view and modify the settings of many AirPort Extreme Base Stations all at once. It's a sophisticated tool that should dramatically reduce the staff cost in administering a network of Base Stations -- academic institutions must be ecstatic. The client tool lets you monitor speed and traffic over time, which can help you better troubleshoot a network's problems. (This tool is similar to a monitoring tab in the original WaveLAN/Lucent/Agere/Proxim Orinoco software.)
The management tools requires AirPort 3.4 and Mac OS X 10.3. AirPort 3.4 was released this morning, and it includes a firmware upgrade for AirPort Extreme Base Stations that adds the ability to push logs to an external "syslog" daemon, which is a standard Unix service for recording error messages and warnings. It's part of Mac OS X, so if you reconfigure an always-on box on your network, your AirPort Extreme Base Station(s) can push its/their messages directly to that system for centralized monitoring.