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AirPort Extreme BaseStation Shared Disk Question

Roy Hobbs

Roy Hobbs

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Apr 29, 2005
1,866
287
I have my new Airport Extreme Base Station up and running.

I have 3 USB drives connected to it and I am able to read/write from all of them

The Disk Sharing section of the new Airport Utility allows you to assign a password or use existing account/username to access these drives.

Does anyone know if you can allow certain users to acces certain drives?

I want to be able to access all the drives but my wife doesnt need access to 2 of the 3. She has overwritten data before so I don't want her accidentally saving over my data.

Any ideas??
 
Trying to hide your porn stash eh? hehe Sorry I have no answer to your question. Good luck!
 
kvanwagoner said:
The Disk Sharing section of the new Airport Utility allows you to assign a password or use existing account/username to access these drives.

Does anyone know if you can allow certain users to acces certain drives?
Click to expand...

Sounds like you've answered your own question when you wrote "...or use existing account/username to access these drives." So if a file is owned by Alice and she turns off read access then Bob could not see those files.

If a shared drive doe not allow user based access then it is mostly useless in a multi-user environment
 
after becoming a "shared disk" the owner is system and not a individual.

Juse seems very odd to have a ALL or NONE situation in terms of shared drive access. Just becuase I want one drive shared to the users on my network does not mean I want all of them shared.
 
I got mine today too....have you gotten your ipods to sync with itunes over airdisk? do you think it's possible? they're recognized as ipods, they just don't automatically sync....
 
danielsan26 said:
I got mine today too....have you gotten your ipods to sync with itunes over airdisk? do you think it's possible? they're recognized as ipods, they just don't automatically sync....
Click to expand...

Nope havent tried that, doesnt seem very useful. Just as easy to plug the iPod into the Mac for syching
 
ChrisA said:
Sounds like you've answered your own question when you wrote "...or use existing account/username to access these drives." So if a file is owned by Alice and she turns off read access then Bob could not see those files.

If a shared drive doe not allow user based access then it is mostly useless in a multi-user environment
Click to expand...

Nope it doesn't work that way. When you create an account you can allocate read/write rights to that account and that is it.

The account on the AEBX is independent from your OS X login.
 
Please Help!

I have a 750GB miniStack v2 (HFS+ Journalled) connected to the Airport Extreme. No problems connecting to it from the MBP wirelessly.

*** BUT I can't seem to find it via my PC Desktop....I'm not a networking expert, can anyone assist?

My goal is to store Docs and picture files onto the ext. HD connected to the Extreme and be accessed (READ and WRITE) by both Mac and PC at the same time.

Also, I've setup the Airport Extreme to use 802.11N (2.4GHz) ONLY....what other settings must I need to do to increase the bandwidth (transfer files speed) between NAS and MBP? Should I use the 5.0GHz instead? And what is Multicast rate settign be to accomplish this? Mine is currently set at 6 Mbps....9, 12, 18 and 24 available to choose from.

Please assist and advice.
 
kvanwagoner said:
I have my new Airport Extreme Base Station up and running.

I have 3 USB drives connected to it and I am able to read/write from all of them.
Click to expand...


How are these drives formatted? I have read that Fat32 does not work well with the new AP Extreme.

Thoughts?
 
17MBPC2D said:
I have a 750GB miniStack v2 (HFS+ Journalled) connected to the Airport Extreme. No problems connecting to it from the MBP wirelessly.

*** BUT I can't seem to find it via my PC Desktop....I'm not a networking expert, can anyone assist?

My goal is to store Docs and picture files onto the ext. HD connected to the Extreme and be accessed (READ and WRITE) by both Mac and PC at the same time.

Also, I've setup the Airport Extreme to use 802.11N (2.4GHz) ONLY....what other settings must I need to do to increase the bandwidth (transfer files speed) between NAS and MBP? Should I use the 5.0GHz instead? And what is Multicast rate settign be to accomplish this? Mine is currently set at 6 Mbps....9, 12, 18 and 24 available to choose from.

Please assist and advice.
Click to expand...


I think you are running into the Windows vs Mac formatting issue where the Mac can read NTFS but Windows cannot read the HFS without special software. Anyone verify this?
It would be nice to have a shared drive that is HFS formatted but I don't think the Airport Extreme can be used to work around this limitation. Would be nice though.
I too would like to know what the Multicast rate is for. My guess is for the Apple TV unit when it comes out. That will help control how much of your bandwidth is used for broadcasting A/V.
 
In regard to the PC question, it shouldn't matter how the drives are formatted...if the BaseStation is acting as a NAS device, it should be no different than a shared folder on a computer. File systems don't matter because the computer or nas device reads the information on the hard drive and encodes it for transport over the universal ethernet standard.

If the base station is not acting as a normal NAS device then I'm totally wrong, but there are plenty of other routers around with usb ports for external HDDs, and they all follow this idea.

I've always just used an old computer with linux, freebsd, macos or even windows be a print server and file server. You can attach all the external HDDs you like, and even an old Pentium 2 will be faster than most any NAS device. Not nearly as slick or quiet as the AE though.
 
Patronus said:
How are these drives formatted? I have read that Fat32 does not work well with the new AP Extreme.

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Can you go into this more? I'm considering this router and have external drives that are all Fat32
 
I have read on this forum (or maybe it was MacForums) that the Fat32 drives hung off of the new AP Extreme could be seen and used by PC's on the network but not the Mac's. I don't understand and I had also heard that the formatting did not matter because of the front-end the router provides for the drive to the network, so....I remain confused. I guess I'll just have to go buy the durn thing and plug it in to find out.
 
I have a western digital passport 160gb hard drive.

I believe is formatted as fat32 and it works wonderful.

The disk shows up on my disk very fast
 
I have a Western Digital Mybook 500gb hooked up to the AE, and it's working just fine. It's formatted Fat32 out of the box.

My lacie D2 drive did not work, due to the built in lacie security login layer.
 
APE Shared Drive Issues

I hooked it up today with 4 WD 500GB Drives. My iTunes resides on a drive. I am unable to see the files and iTunes will not play any files. It appears that the drive files is under the owner of myself but when connected to the APE the owner is system. It seems I am unable to change the owner to system as I do not have the priviledge. Does anyone know how to do this. I need to utilize some use that I can see the files and my wife can see the files from her MacBook.
 
htdub said:
I have a Western Digital Mybook 500gb hooked up to the AE, and it's working just fine. It's formatted Fat32 out of the box.

My lacie D2 drive did not work, due to the built in lacie security login layer.
Click to expand...

Does that mean, ALL LaCie D2s are not working on the Airport ?
That would be a bummer for me..
:confused:
 
Karlchen said:
Does that mean, ALL LaCie D2s are not working on the Airport ?
That would be a bummer for me..
:confused:
Click to expand...

I think any drive that has some sort of login or boot manager will not work, unless your format it to a brick.

The lacie d2 FAQ states that the secure login can't not be turned off.
 
htdub said:
I think any drive that has some sort of login or boot manager will not work, unless your format it to a brick.

The lacie d2 FAQ states that the secure login can't not be turned off.
Click to expand...

I have a LaCie 500 GB d2 hooked up and it worked for awhile but its been inconsistent. I haven't been able to connect via Airport over the past few days. I'm going to have to check out the FAQ.
 
Cant read all files from FAT32 through AE

Has anyone had a problem with reading from a FAT32 that is connected through the AE. If I hook it directly up to my macbook I can Read/write all files without problems, but when connected to my AE and then wireless to my book I can only see half of the files. I have another disc connected through the AE formatted for Mac and it works fine.

Reason for having the problem making harddrive in FAT32 is so everyone can access it, MAC or PC at my house.

The harddrive is a brand new WD 320GB book

Would be nice to hear if you have any ideas...
 
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