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New Airport Extreme Utility needs some work

A

avalys

macrumors 6502
Original poster
The new Airport Utility needs a little work. It seems rushed and sloppy.

First, when you install, it leaves the old 'Airport Admin Utility' intact (the new one is just called 'Airport Utility'). It should delete the old one - it makes no sense to leave both of them on the system, and is rather confusing.

Second, the automatic WDS configuration that the old 'Airport Admin Utility' had is gone. You now have to enter MAC addresses by hand, which entails a lot of swapping back and forth between networks and open screens. A pain in the ass.

Third, I don't see why we should need a separate "Airport Disk Utility" to mount a shared drive - why can't it show up in the "Go" menu, like all other shared drives? Again, sloppy.

Finally, there is no button for manual setup - it defaults to a wizard, and you have to look around in the menus to find the advanced options. And even when you select the advanced options, the next time you bring up the utility, the wizard is back.

I hope Apple clears this stuff up - it reminds me of shoddily-engineered software from the Windows world.
 
Oh ****. I actually ordered one of these thinking I will be getting Apple's typically "quality"!

If you need the Airport Utility to mount a shared drive, how is that going to work out for Windows clients? 😕
 
Perhaps, they made a sweet new Illuminous version that they can't show until Leopard is unveiled so they instead released a interim Tiger version to hold people over until Leopard. I was kind of hoping it would be bad as to allude to us that there is really a new user interface coming.
 
It will still be better than my Linksys 802.11B access point from 6 years ago that is starting to fail. If it is at the Cincinnati Apple store tomorrow I will be purchasing one. They were sold out today.
 
iW00t and Cybergypsy, it isn't so bad as to make me recommend you not buy one of the new Extremes - it's just a little unpolished. Once you've got it set up, the Airport works great.

You can access the shared drive from Windows over SMB, without installing any software.
 
avalys said:
The new Airport Utility needs a little work. It seems rushed and sloppy.

First, when you install, it leaves the old 'Airport Admin Utility' intact (the new one is just called 'Airport Utility'). It should delete the old one - it makes no sense to leave both of them on the system, and is rather confusing.

Second, the automatic WDS configuration that the old 'Airport Admin Utility' had is gone. You now have to enter MAC addresses by hand, which entails a lot of swapping back and forth between networks and open screens. A pain in the ass.

Third, I don't see why we should need a separate "Airport Disk Utility" to mount a shared drive - why can't it show up in the "Go" menu, like all other shared drives? Again, sloppy.

Finally, there is no button for manual setup - it defaults to a wizard, and you have to look around in the menus to find the advanced options. And even when you select the advanced options, the next time you bring up the utility, the wizard is back.

I hope Apple clears this stuff up - it reminds me of shoddily-engineered software from the Windows world.
Click to expand...
Agreed on all of the above. Also, I can't find an updated binary from Apple's support site - it HAS to loaded from the CD that shipped w/the Airport-N.

I'm really surprised that Apple let their accountants pull this $1.98 thing. Jobs never let them run things before, why now? Licensing? Even so, this nickle and dime stuff has got to go.

And finally, try to assign an IP to the ethernet/switch portion of the new Airport-N. If you're already on ANY network besides 10.0 or 192.1, then you're screwed. You'll have to change all the IPs from your entire network of hosts to match the AIRPORT. Somebody needs to be taken out back and whipped over this. Why is it Apple has the sloppiest IP menu interfaces?
 
buckwheat said:
And finally, try to assign an IP to the ethernet/switch portion of the new Airport-N. If you're already on ANY network besides 10.0 or 192.1, then you're screwed. You'll have to change all the IPs from your entire network of hosts to match the AIRPORT. Somebody needs to be taken out back and whipped over this. Why is it Apple has the sloppiest IP menu interfaces?
Click to expand...

Not really, you can configure your Airport as bridge mode if you already have an existing WAN gateway on your network.

I have got to admit I am fairly impressed with the Airport, it is quite a nice piece of kit apart from some small kinks.
 
avalys said:
The new Airport Utility needs a little work. It seems rushed and sloppy.

First, when you install, it leaves the old 'Airport Admin Utility' intact (the new one is just called 'Airport Utility'). It should delete the old one - it makes no sense to leave both of them on the system, and is rather confusing.

Second, the automatic WDS configuration that the old 'Airport Admin Utility' had is gone. You now have to enter MAC addresses by hand, which entails a lot of swapping back and forth between networks and open screens. A pain in the ass.

Third, I don't see why we should need a separate "Airport Disk Utility" to mount a shared drive - why can't it show up in the "Go" menu, like all other shared drives? Again, sloppy.

Finally, there is no button for manual setup - it defaults to a wizard, and you have to look around in the menus to find the advanced options. And even when you select the advanced options, the next time you bring up the utility, the wizard is back.

I hope Apple clears this stuff up - it reminds me of shoddily-engineered software from the Windows world.
Click to expand...

It leave the old Utility because there are old base stations that arent supported by the new utility.
 
Bridge mode only bridges the WAN port. If it's busy with a Cable modem or something that won't work.

Configure the Extreme-N like this:

DSL modem/DHCP --> WAN port --> Local ethernet

That local ethernet part had better be one of three pre-configured subnets from Apple or you will have to re-arrange your entire network to fit the Airport-N.

If your had a printer on 15.2.1.2 or something, along with 45 other hosts on the 15.2.x.x network you are screwed. The Airport-N only does 10.0.x.x, 192.1.2.x and 192.168.1.x.

That's all that Apple ever figured we'd need. Wow - I can see Microsoft doing stuff like this but APPLE? Apple has always been the trailblazers of all this stuff. This is just horrible engineering is all, they've farmed out their design then went to a success party and forgot about them...
 
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