Airport Extreme N Review + MAC Address Spoofing Made Easy!

[EricChunky]

Most (not all) people that complain about the lack of MAC spoofing funtionality simply don't have the Apple Spirit: Think Different

Anyway, here's the walk-around and I'll use my Campus Network as an example:

(1) Mark down your Airport ID, that's the basestation's exteranl MAC address (the address that ISP sees)

(2) Spoof your computer network card's ID!! I did this in a Windows Machine because there are a lot of ready made "MAC Spoof" software. Simply change your machine's network MAC to the Airport ID you marked down earlier.

(3) Connect that computer directly to your ISP. Do the registration / activation thingy. Your ISP will register your new MAC address (the fake MAC address of your network card).

(4) Unplug the network cable from your computer, plug it into your AirPort. And boom! See the light go green.

This method will work in any MAC restricted environment IN THEORY. Let me know your case if it doesn't, we'll sort it out together.

Btw... Airport Exterme is absoulutly a crap router.

(1) It restarts at least twice a day
(2), become extremely slow if you do heavy BitTorrent, and won't reover even if you stopped.
(3) My Windows MachineS just never manage to mount the AirDisk (but can R/W via Network neigbours)...
(4) and what? when all macs are Gigalan, this thing has Fast Enthernet.
(5) Oh yes, it doesn't takes any NTFS or Linux Partition.
(6) ****!!!! BE CAREFUL what you plug into its USB port. I firstly put a USB hub in, sharing 1 x printer, 1 x harddrive and 1 x iPod (latest shuffle). Guess what, the APPLE version of BLUESCREEN OF DEATH!! The computer locks up and you have to restart!!! ****!!! I tried it many times and everytime it only make me feel worse. The last time i saw that screen was about 2 years ago when testing the Tiger beta....

I mean, all the problems *might* be solved by some firmware updates but again, it seems like it's APple's policy to make the first gen product junk. Two words: Hold Back.

 

[peterjhill]

wow.. I feel bad that you have had some many problems with your AExtN.

I have been pretty happy with mine. I have not seen mine reboot. I am thinking of monitoring via snmp.. since it gives its uptime when you poll the device, I can easily check to see how long mine has been up. Last time I checked it had been up for a week. I am doing Vonage VoIP and have my Tivo connected to it.. it would be annoying if it died on me in the middle of a phone call. I guess I have been lucky.

As for the lack of gig connectivity... I am guessing you have a separate gigabit switch in your house somewhere? or where you expecting a sub $200 wireless 802.11 a/b/g/n router with built in nas and 4 port switch to run at gig speeds? The dumbest of linksys gig switches costs around $90 on amazon.com. It will not do routing.. so no NAT.. no WAN/LAN port.. And if you really think that thing can do line rate gig.. I seriously doubt it.. I noticed it does not list things like how big the input buffers are on the interfaces? Are they shared buffers? How does it deal with head of line blocking? It is likely some sort of broadcom chip in it. If they are using something like:
http://www.broadcom.com/products/BCM5680

if it does 12 Million packets per second and those packets are all at max MTU, of a typical ethernet 1500 bytes, 8 bits in a byte, then you get:
http://www.google.com/search?q=12000000+*+1500+*+8
144 Megabits per second max throughput.. Sure the switch will neigotiate at gigabit speeds, but that does not mean that it will actually forward packets at those speeds.

If you want to do line rate gigabit switching, you will need to pay more than $90..

According to apple:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305038
I would recommend that you format your drive fat32 if you want both windows and mac machines to access the drive. Mac supports CIFS alot better than windows supports AFP.

As for NTFS and any of the various linux file systems, Reiser, ext2, ext3... yep, I don't blame apple for not supporting them.. NTFS, I believe, is proprietary to Microsoft. Support for NTFS on any platform other than an MS one has always been one that requires luck ;-)

As for the linux file systems? I guess it would be nice to take an external drive from a linux box and connect it to my airport extreme to copy some files to and fro, but I don't blame apple for it not working.. AFAIK, there is not super easy way for a casual user to plug that ext3 usb drive into their mac and have it mount, so why would it work on an airport? Wishful thinking? Again, FAT32 to the rescue.. it is not perfect, but it is fairly cross platform.

As for the product being junk, it certainly does not sound like it fit your needs. I would love to see a product that does solve all of your problems.. Your best bet would be a http://www.soekris.com/ box running freebsd or linux. Of course you will have to hack in the things like bonjour based service discovery for printers and disks if you wanted to make it nice and easy for people like, say my wife, to easily use. Maybe that is not a feature you need though and can be dropped.

Good luck!

 

[EricChunky]

wow.. I feel bad that you have had some many problems with your AExtN.

...

1. Linksys $165.xx GigaLan, NAS and other goodies
http://www.amazon.com/Linksys-WRT350N-Wireless-N-Gigabit-Storage/dp/B000H96IN2

I didn't try it, but hey, its a 'cisco company' afterall.

2. I want to build a (very) fast file server and it must be easily accessabe to all my home computers (mac, windoz, linux and some handheld OS). Will a Cheap CPU + Mobo plus a decent PCI-E RAID card do?

 

[peterjhill]

1. Linksys $165.xx GigaLan, NAS and other goodies
http://www.amazon.com/Linksys-WRT350N-Wireless-N-Gigabit-Storage/dp/B000H96IN2

I didn't try it, but hey, its a 'cisco company' afterall.

2. I want to build a (very) fast file server and it must be easily accessabe to all my home computers (mac, windoz, linux and some handheld OS). Will a Cheap CPU + Mobo plus a decent PCI-E RAID card do?

Interesting..
The linksys only supports b/g/n. It only operates in the 2.4 GHz range. Not that it is a bad thing. I personally like having my Airport Extreme running in the 5GHz range so that I can connect my MBP CD with 802.11a. I then use my Linksys WRT54G to connect my 17 PB with 802.11g. It is a personal thing.. That is the great thing about standards.. many different products and vendors have different options that do different things.

The Airport NAS is certainly simpler to set up than the Linksys version. Again, that can be good or bad.. Apple = easy with less options.. Linksys = harder, more configuration.. For me, I have no PCs on my home network. It was an easy decision.. Integrating the linksys into a mac environment would be more work with less payoff than an all apple solution.

Why are you looking for a NAS solution? What are you trying to do? If you want a high performance file server on your network, your best bet would be a hardware raid in a real server.. It will cost more than $200.

cheap, fast, easy... is that how it goes?

Don't think that home gigabit networking gear will really give you gigabit performance..