First Thoughts: AirPort Extreme Base Station

I have a question about putting your iTunes library on the networked drive.....you would be able to play music off the drive but would you be able to make playlists of music on that drive?

It would be great to have a centralized library of your music on the networked drive and not have anything on connected computers.

@fred,

try configuring the other two expresses while they are hard-wired to the new router. when they are configured, then move them to where they will go. Hope that works.

Be sure and do a lot of sustained transfer tests when you get that external drive. Ars Technica reported a number of crashes and terminated transfers, and some of the readers there reported the same thing. Also, why no GigE ports???
People with multiple computers want to be able to transfer files intra-LAN as fast as possible, and probably all Macs sold now are GigE-capable.

I have found a good manual how to change the Airport-card in MacBook Pro. Written in german!
http://nw.inetpool.de/

I have the new airport extreme, but my VPN doesn't work with it. What the? It worked on my previous airport extreme. Anyone else having trouble using VPN with it?

#22: AFAIK, Apple's AirPort printer sharing is still bound by which printer drivers Mac OS X has installed by default. Since we owned an HP printer for quite a while, I got pretty familiar with the fact that OS X doesn't have very good support for HP's printers, so that might be part of the problem.

I honestly never tried hooking our printer up to an APE or AEBS (AirPort Express Base Station), but I *think* believe it should work if you have the drivers already installed on the Mac you're administrating all this from. Do you? If not, try plugging the printer into your Mac, installing said drivers, then plugging the printer into your AEBS to see if that fixes the issue.

I understand the ups and downs of using security, hiding an SSID and not using any security at all. And I'm not advertising my choice to forgo security - *for now* - as an adequate alternative. I don't believe most readers are going to misunderstand what I wrote, but I'll consider editing the post.

I was simply mentioning it as my choice, as I buy Apple hardware for it to *just work,* and this AirPort issue has been going on *at least* since last summer and it still isn't fixed. Running WPA security on my APE *still* causes my MBP to randomly drop a connection, while the G5 iMac in our basement keeps chugging along just fine.

I'll revisit security one of these days when I have the time to sit down and do some research on it. I'm personally not that concerned about the issue in the immediate future, as I feel we have enough other security measures in place.

@Mabsey...

Thanks for the feedback.

The main reason I don't do any kind of WEP/WPA is due to a couple of older devices I use that don't play nicely with WEP or WPA. Combine that with the fact that I live pretty far from the next neighbor, I'm not too worried about eavesdropping.

I will be enabling WPA later on this year when I replace my last two 802.11b devices with something newer.

*Dave

Hidden SSIDs only make it difficult for your next door neighbor to *accidentally* connect to your access point. Programs like MacStumbler will find "hidden" access points at the click of a button... no hacking experience required.

One should never consider broadcasting my e-mails, chats, and transfered files in plain text across the area of city block.

Before assuming that you'll have said problems again, why don't you at least try using security. Perhaps the problems you had been having with your old APE have been remedied in the newly engineered model. People reading this blog might mistake your steps for "securing" your Airport as being adequate... which they aren't.

Am I the only one to have a huge problem with getting my USB printer to work with this new Extreme? It refuses to allow my HP 4215 all-in-one to be added to the printer list, I always get a 9672 error message. Any ideas?