AEBS and external USB disk redux

OK, I have been searching this and other forums (fora?) for an answer to whether or not one can mount an external USB hard drive to an Airport Extreme Base Station and have that drive available to (i.e., mounted on) a mac using that AEBS as it's primary router; I have not come across a definitive reading (can anyone point to a good thread that gets to the root of the issue?), but here's what I understand so far:

One cannot use such a mounted disk as a TimeMachine disk; there may be some hacks that allow this, and maybe some day Apple will update the firmware, that may frustrate some, but I dont really need this, I have a dedicated FW800 disk that I will connect directly.

There are many threads that point to more difficulty involving LaCie disks

Apple talks about making sure that such disks must be formatted as HFS+, have only one partition (no RAID settings) and use 512 sized blocks

Many posts indicating that the current AEBS Firmware is flaky in this regard and some have rolled back to a previous version to solve the problem.

All I wish to do is mount a drive and use it to free up some space on my MBP drive by moving iTunes and iPhoto/Aperture main databases there; I can do that now with a USB drive connected to my MBP but would prefer to have these files available via wireless, so I can roam about the house.

A lot of folk seem to be returning their AEBS purchases because of inability to set this up.

bottom line, is there a definitive answer on whether one can mount a USB drive on a AEBS?

 

I should say that I did have all this working fine some time back; a 500GB LaCie Quadra drive attached to a Extreme Base Station. showed up relatively flawlessly. Kept a lot of media files there. The connection was robust enough that I could stream movie files to the DVD player, or move files to the MBP HD for offline viewing; the latter was by no means super fast, but workable. Then something changed in between an upgrade to Leopard and AEBS firmware and I have never been able to restore that setup, gave up and just do a direct connect.

 

well ok I saw that and applied the firmware update. I also have a new disc, a LaCie 500GB USB 2.0 drive. I reformatted the drive using Disk Utility, one partition using GUID, ran the disk utility repair on it to be sure it was clean.

shut down everything, hooked up the drive to the AEBS, re-started everything. No disk in finder; disk utility does not see it. Airport Utility does see the disk. I think I have set everything right, including file sharing, but nothing gives!

I am missing an obvious setting or something--it feels so close!

--p

 

I guess it is a case of duh!

after bouncing around different firmware versions, I could get to the point where Airport Utility could "see" the USB disk connected to the AEBS. I could also see it and see files on it in a finder window as a shared (sharepoint) drive, but never get the mounted disk icon on my desktop.

here's where the duh moment came in, thanks to a discussion group member over at apple.

Go to Finder -> Preferences -> General and make sure "Connected Servers" is checked in the list of "Show these items on the Desktop" items.

and thar she blows!

thanks for input folks.