WOOHOO, I'M ON THE FRONT PAGE!!!! I'm goin' to California, and North Dakota, and South Dakota, and Oregon, and Washington, and then--oh wait...
So yeah, HUGE props to
arn for honoring my request to be credited for the submission.
First time with my name in lights (at least on a Mac rumors site).
Anyway, I'd like to emphasize that this update enables
WPA on all AirPort cards, old and new. Unfortunately, it doesn't remove AirPort's other WPA limitation--namely that you can't use it on a network with WDS. Like our network.
I'm sure this isn't Apple's fault, and we've never had a problem with people breaking into the network anyway, so for now we'll be sticking with 128-bit WEP.
As for people asking about AirPort issues...well, the wireless part of our graphite (original) ABS crapped out about 18 months ago, so we were without AirPort until we finally bought an AEBS and then another one (connected via WDS, like I said) about four months ago. The graphite ABS is currently in several pieces, so I'm not positive it's still working, but last time I checked it made a nice, compact, Ethernet-equipped modem (and DHCP server), which will come in handy at some point.
No problems at all with the AEBS's until I tried to install this 5.3 firmware update today: with the main base station, the Admin Utility would immediately quit (with no error messages or anything) as soon as the progress bar for uploading the firmware appeared. With the other one, it would stay on that progress bar indefinitely (until I force-quit it). But after restarting both base stations the update went without a hitch on both of them. Haven't noticed any differences with the new firmware yet...
BTW, I was extremely impressed with how easy it was to set up WDS. I was expecting to have to type each base station's MAC address into the other, and fiddle with all kinds of other stuff, but when you've got the ABS's within range of each other the Admin Utility will ask you if you want to "select and configure this base station as a remote one", or something like that, and it automagically does it for you. I did double-check the settings on the remote (auto-configured) one and I don't think it had gotten some of the minor settings exactly right (like whether to set a closed network). But other than that it was very, very slick.
FWIW
The Famous
WM