Yes! Yes!

After 12 months of not being able to use my router, Apple shipped Firmware 7.3.1 which passes SonicWall VPN packets!

So far, the router is fast, super fast. Now to see if it keeps connections!

I’ve been in touch with AppleCare ever since I got this router. They have continued to “look into” our VPN issues with SonicWall. They even swapped my router for a new one (before the gigabits came out)

The last email I from Apple was today:

It appears we still do not have a solution or a workaround for this particular issue. Again, I would like to apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you and hope we will correct this issue sometime in the future.

Sigh.

Ok this product is a joke. Apple has a bad enough record with routers as it is (My 10 month old router still does not allow Elizabeth’s VPN to connect, wheres linksys and d-link do) but check this scenario out:

• Back up to Time Capsule, oh laptop kernel panics. Reboot. Wait 9 hours while it scans disk and backup over wifi.

• Hard disk fails for some reason. Oh explain to the wife/etc that you have no network for days now while hard drive is replaced in router.

ROFL What were they thinking? Don’t buy this. Wait for them to fix the external port on the current base station, or support Macs as time machines over wifi.

Summary - DUD

I’ve been using my Apple Airport Extreme N router since March. Some things work great, like iChat now functions perfectly.

However, other things, like accessing VPN with SonicWall’s client have never worked and there are still no solutions from Apple.

Now, the damned thing can’t see my printer. Power cycle the printer, unplug from hub, plug directly into router, nothing. I am not rebooting this thing because Elizabeth is using Skype.

Apple requires customers to reboot far too often to fix problems. Apple is not being prudent on fixing bugs with this product, and in some cases are introducing more.

Apple is set to really enjoy a lot of market share, but that means that each and every product has to be a winner. Sadly, their routers have never lived up to the challenge.

If you need a very simple, basic router, that just sends packets, then the Airport Extreme N is pretty damned nice. If you want a product you can rely on to work with all of your internet applications, as well as support all of the features Apple supplies, you might want to look elsewhere. Sadly, every other router seems to suck too.

Come on Apple - Step it up. Make us proud. 7 months is more than long enough to wait for a product that works as advertised.

Six months ago I bought an Airport Extreme N Basestation. The VPN has never worked with Sonicwall VPN client.

Now, six months later, firmware 7.2.1 is out and the VPN is still broken.

How patient should one be, waiting for Apple to support standards?

Linksys works, why can’t Apple?

Yesterday I had Verizon switch my FIOS from PPPOE to DHCP. I was an early customer so I was on the cruddy PPPOE equipment. That was a long process but Keith rocked and got me taken care of within a day. Awesome!

Last night I start my usual routine of testing the SonicWall VPN with the Apple Airport Extreme N, just to see if DHCP affects the process at all. I disconnect the Linksys, connect the Airport to the ethernet jack, reset it to DHCP and oops, no internet connection.

Hmm. No IP, nothing. Damn! This is just DHCP, what could be wrong?

I plugged the Linksys back in and sure enough, it works. Ok. A little googling later I find an obscure post that says you must release the dhcp before switching routers, because Verizon caches the MAC address with your IP. Ugh!

I go to the Linksys Status page and click Release DHCP. Plug the Airport in and yay! I have an IP! Awesome!

Well not so awesome.

You see, switching to DHCP didn’t fix my VPN issue, so back to bridge mode the Airport goes. Plug the Linksys back in. No IP. Ugh, here we go again.

Fire up Airport Utility. Hunt, hunt. Damnit Apple, no Release DHCP button! I guess they figured that is an “Advanced” feature Airport users would not need.

Apple constantly blows this one with it’s routers - Not putting in features like MAC address cloning, etc, in order to make the routers simpler to support and then we get burned at 3am.

I had to call Verizon. 15 minutes later I had my DHCP released and the Linksys was working once again.

So now I’m really screwed. The Airport does not work with Elizabeth’s VPN, the router is over 4 months old (Because I’ve been patiently testing things for Apple) and now each time they want me to try something, I’ll need to spend 15 minutes on the phone with Verizon.

Sigh. Apple - Get on the ball and make your routers first class, please. Make them easy to set up and then add an Advanced tab for those inevitable cases when we get hosed. The world of networking sucks and while I appreciate the effort to hide it’s ugliness, you’ve only harmed me when I need to advance beyond the minimal controls.

People following my blog have noticed that I’ve a lot of problems with my Airport Extreme N, from VPN, to dropouts, to AirDisk.

Throughout all of this, Daniel has been giving me excellent service, including phone updates, new equipment and status on the issues.

I’m looking forward to the day I can report that my issues are fixed, but I do appreciate them staying with this obscure problem until its resolved, especially right in the middle of iPhone madness.

I’ve just discovered a nasty bug with AirPort Disk on firmware 7.1.1. While using Chronosync to backup my iPhoto library, CS kept complaining about a file already existing. Well replace it! So I finally started looking at the files.

On the source, the filename was: 100_0002_2.jpg

On the Airport Disk: iNode142770

Oops!

So I unmounted the disk, connected it locally and checked the file. It had the proper filename of 100_0002_2.jpg! I then ran DiskWarrior 4 and the disk passed with flying colors.

Ok, back to AirDisk. No change. Still borked.

Unmount from AirDisk again and now mount on TiBook. Turn on File Sharing. Mount drive. Proper filename!

I don’t know if my MacBook pro has cached a bad set of filenames, or if the AirDisk just has a major bug, but I’d be wary for now.

While Charles reports he’s had one dropout of AirDisk (My name for Airport Disk) since 7.1.1 shipped, I’ve had an entire day of a disk mounted and operating quickly, about 2-3MB/s, over 802.11n and USB 2. Not bad I guess.

I even used ChronoSync to sync 25gb of data to the AirDisk. Its been going for hours now, but no hiccups.

Next test will be in the morning after the drive has had a chance to sleep.

I am a contractor for a major out of state university. In order to get expenses reimbursed, I have to fill out a form. An awful form at that.

They send me a link to the PDF file. I open it in preview and I cannot edit it. Fine. I download Acrobat Reader, which lets me edit the forms but it will not let me save the document, or print to PDF! I have to print it out and scan it back in to email it. ugh.

So now its weeks later and I need to mail in the real form. My Canon IPX 4200 printer is out of three inks. I check into various laser printers, etc and finally decide to just print the two sheets via kinkos.

Kinkos charges 11 cents per page, so two sheets is 22 cents. Except that they have a $1 minimal order. Fine. I have them print 9 blank expense forms. The order sheet informs me my print job will be done at 3pm, which is 3 miles away, but near the grocery store, so I’ll kill two birds with one trip.

At 3:30 I head to Kinkos and they say my job was “suspended.” After 20 mins of looking around, they finally decide to just print it on a laser writer. Only the expense PDF from hell prints out in Klingon. Its a mess. So I walk out with my one good sheet. Damn.

A highly recommended color laser is $280 and toner lasts a LONG time, but with the uncertainty of my job, I decide to spring for the $70 of ink, which carts have special chips on them that unless I want to mess around with knives and such, I am stuck paying $14/color.

I head off to the store and then home. I plug the 2 empty inks in (I bought all five because I am smart) and sure enough, the other three start blinking. Ok I replace those and the lights on the printer are happy.

Except the Airport Extreme N basestation isn’t. It can’t see the printer. Damnit. So I cycle the printer, unplug the power to the printer, unplug the USB, nothing. Says no printer. Apple discussions say to reboot router.

What the hell. I have people on Skype, etc, I can’t reboot my router just to make a printer or disk show up. Damn you Apple. Get some quality assurance on the Airport team ok? And fix the Sonicwall VPN issue too!

Anyway, I happen to have just set up my old Tibook as a PPC code test machine so I run the printer into that, download the canon drivers, reboot, turn on print sharing and I can finally print.

Total time: Four hours.

Why did our technical lives get so complicated?

Apple released version 7.1 of the firmware for the Apple Airport Extreme N router today. While people on Apple Discussions have suggested it fixed the VPN client issues with Nortel software, but our tests here show that Sonicwall Client 3.1.0.556 still does not function. Sigh.

As noted in the linked Ars Technica article, Apple messed up and left the IPv6 firewall off. Oops.

Read

Out of the box, the router will connect you to the IPv6 Internet using an automatically configured tunnel. This means putting IPv6 packets put inside regular IPv4 packets. Those of you who really want to test IPv6 (you know who you are) are better off manually configuring a tunnel to your ISP or a tunnel broker, this is faster. If you don’t want IPv6 and don’t want to turn it off on all MacOS X and Windows Vista systems connected to the AirPort Extreme, you can select “Link-local only” as the IPv6 mode. If you leave IPv6 turned on, you may want to select “Block incoming IPv6 connections” to turn on the IPv6 firewall or your network is wide open over IPv6, even if it’s firewalled over IPv4.

Apple’s new Airport Extreme N base station has a neat feature called AirDisk. You can attach drives to the USB 2 port on the base station and share them with users on your network, or over the internet apparently.

Installation is easy. With the Airport Utility, you click Disks and choose how you want to share the drives you might attach. You can simply use the same password as the base station, assign a password to access the disks, or create disk accounts with privileges.

I chose to assign a single disk password. I pressed Update to save my changes and the base station rebooted. I found this fairly poor, as if I want to do basic disk administration, I have to knock off other users who might be using Skype, etc. You should not have to reboot the base station to change anything other than WAN settings.

I attach my drive and my laptop says “hey, I see new drives!” because I had installed the Airport software. I told it to mount the drives and gave it the password. Instantly they showed up.

Disk performance is poor. Over gigabit ethernet to the base station (which only has 100/10) I got roughly 700K/s to the drive. I don’t know how this compares if the drive is attached directly to the computer, but I will test later and update.

I do however think this will be nice for Time Machine in Leopard. What one could do is have one time machine drive per computer in the house. Attach it directly via firewire and let time machine do its full backup. Then attach it to a hub in the base station and let the nightly backups happen, slower of course, but they should be much less data.

This way, the drives won’t need to always be on the machine, which in the case of a laptop, is nice.

I got an IM today and was told my new Aiport Extreme N basestation was in at the Mac Store! So I headed on over and picked it up.

After I finished work, I plugged it into the laptop via ethernet to configure it. The Airport Assistant was easy to use and it even told me the ethernet to WAN was not plugged in when I was setting it up, so I would not get internet access!

After setup, I connected over wifi and all worked fine. I then reconfigured the Express to connect to the Extreme, again that went fine.

Finally I moved it, plugged it into my Verizon FIOS ethernet port and powered it up. Instant internet access!

I ran some speed tests and whereas under the linksys I would get 1.8mbps up, 8mbps down over 802.11g, I was now getting 1.8/14.65! In other words, my 802.11g performance is now equivalent to the lan speeds when connecting out to the internet!

Both of Elizabeth’s Windows XP laptops are only getting 3.x mbps down and i have not determined what that issue is yet.

I plugged in my Canon ip4200 printer, which wasn’t seen by the Mac Book Pro. I then realized that I didn’t have the drivers on this machine and they are not part of Tiger. When the printer was connected to the G5, it had the drivers and thus no other machines needed them. Now, the basestation acts more like a direct connection to the printer and thus all machines that want to print will need the drivers installed.

I have not tried AirDisk yet.

The first major issue came up trying to use a corporate VPN client from Windows. No go. After some research, its a widespread problem. One solution is to set up a reserved IP address for the computer needing VPN access and then set the “default host” (dmz) to that machine’s IP. This lame workaround works, but exposes the machine to non-firewalled internet access. Hopefully a fix is shortcoming.

However, while the dmz was set up routing all ports to the PC, Erick video chatted me and it worked fine! Instant connection too.

Pros

• Fast 802.11g performance with Mac Book Pro Core Duo (full 15mbps down)
• Easy setup
• AirDisk fast reads
• Stronger signal than Linksys WRT54gs

Cons

• Need default host work around to make Windows SonicWall VPN client work
• Windows 802.11g performance very slow (3 vs 15mbps) - Wired speed is fine - Same performance on WRT54GS!
• Need to reboot after making any changes, such as to add a new user to AirDisk
• Updating/Rebooting does not reset FIOS PPOE connection -Base station thinks it has a connection, but it doesn’t. Have to pull the power plug.

Found in the manual for the new Airport Extreme (of which I am anxiously awaiting) is this tidbit which might help us iChat users out there:

You can set up NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP). NAT-PMP is an Internet Engineering Task Force Internet Draft, an alternative to the more common Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol implemented in many network address translation (NAT) routers. NAT-PMP allows a computer in a private network (behind a NAT router) to automatically configure the router to allow parties outside the private network to contact this computer.

Included in the protocol is a method for retrieving the public IP address of a NAT gateway, allowing a client to make this public IP address and port number known to peers that may wish to communicate with it. This protocol is implemented in current Apple products, including Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express networking products, and Bonjour for Windows.

This could prove very interesting indeed.

I cancelled my order for AppleTV and Airport Extreme .n. I’ll pick up an AE at The Mac Store when they are in (am going to preorder today) and with my 1080i TV, I just can’t see the 720p of AppleTV working well with my cruddy scaler.

So I’ll pick up Aperture instead and get to work on an Aperture compatible BetterHTMLExport.

If it wasn’t clear by Apple, MacWorld Expo is ending as we know it. Today Apple used the MacWorld Expo venue to do three things:

• Introduce Apple TV, a consumer device to shuttle media from your computer to the television
• Introduce iPhone, a brand new phone platform
• Change its name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple Inc.

See a theme here? Think Differently is well in place at Apple Inc.

So lets talk about these products.

Apple TV

Alright, I bought one for the following two reasons:

• Apple in the living room interests me
• I wanted something to play with the 802.11n Airport Express I was ordering also

I have some questions about Apple TV though. Here are a few:

• Does the Apple TV upscale to 1080i or does the TV need to do that? My Toshiba has a poor scaler and if Apple TV leaves this up to the TV, it will look poor.
• Of course I want to rip my DVDs onto a server for playing them on Apple TV - When will a instant Handbrake for Apple TV be available?
• As mentioned, I ordered an Airport Extreme for the speed, but as with other 802.11x technology, the speed of the network is only as fast as the fastest devide on the network. This means if I use the router with my laptop, or my girlfriend’s laptops, or my Wii, the performance will be negated.
• Will Apple sell 720p content? If not, what 720p content do they expect me to watch?

I think this is a fascinating first step for Apple. I plan on giving them a lot of feedback.

iPhone

Alright, we can finally stop talking about the rumors, and now speculate about what it will and won’t do! Lets see some concerns I have over the iPhone as shown today. (I will skip the obvious drooling of the amazing stuff it does)

• Battery, battery, battery. Whats with the built in battery? Its ook for an ipod to go dead, but watching a movie on your phone will surely reduce the battery life by a large amount. So then you get an important phone call and oops, its off. Slide finger, damn. dead.
• Memory - 8 gigabytes is awesome for a phone, but its not enough to replace my iPod. So I will still need both. I guess that fixes the above problem. Altho a card slot would have been nice.
• Applications - All indications are that we will not be allowed to install our own applications. I hear that the binaries are digitally signed and the SDK will be closed, and the future iPods will all have digitally signed applications as well - no more linux on ipods. The real reason for this move is likely virus control - Neither Apple nor Cingular will have to support your screwed up phone if you installed a malware application onto it.
• 3G - I’d really like a faster internet connection than EDGE
• Touchscreen - Ok it rocks, yadda yadda. Until I use it, I am skeptical.
• One handed use - This is a biggie, even when just walking around, I want to be able to answer, dial, etc one handed. Again I won’t know until I hold one if this will be possible.
• No mention of a voice recorder. This feature is invaluable when parking in the Disneyland parking structure. No joke.
• Charger - What is the charger going to look like? Another brick to carry around with me? At least the car charger should just be an iPod car charger. I bet someone makes a charger with two dock connectors on it now.
• No mention if we’re locked into lame Cingular pay per ringtones or if we can do what we should be able to do, make ringtones from segments of songs right in iTunes.

There are just too many questions that popped up during the day. Time will provide answers.

iPod

What I would buy, like now is an 80gb iPod with that screen. Yum.

Leopard

What the hell? Its MacWorld. Where were the secret Leopard features?

iLife

Again, no iLife? What’s going on in Cupertino?

iWork

I see a pattern emerging.

Summary

In summary, this really was a big day for Apple. Apple has not been just a computer company for a long time, but now they’re really not a computer company. Apple will learn - Apple will take their lumps, listen and keep innovating.

I’ll own an iPhone - Just not sure which version I’ll own.

Sorry Erick, I wanted in on the early batch

Yes, Apple did release a 802.11n Airport Extreme, they just didn’t mention it in the keynote.