Nothing to see here. Move along please.

A HUGE let down

The Apple(tm) AirPort Extreme II

[2011-03-11 heavily edited for accuracy and what not ]

This product looked like a real winner and the ideal upgrade to our ageing but ever faithful, LynkSys WRT54G. Only, it simply didn’t work for us at all, due in my humble opinion to poor programming design. WHAT?! From Apple?! Well… yes, apparently. I’m actually still in shock as I type this.

So what’s wrong with it?

Well, it turns out that the AE DHCP client for the WAN (Internet) port cannot handle the IP addresses offered by various modems running in half-bridge mode. The result, for those living in countries where PPPoE is not the norm — ZERO Internet connectivity, unless you’re lucky to have an arguably half baked half-bridge modem. (There have been several replies to my forum posts from people using their AE’s and Apple Time Capules with half-bridge modems successfully. However, Google seems to suggest that the majority have the same problem we experienced.)

In this specific case, when our D-Link 502T, firmware-upgraded DSL2 modem runs in half-bridge mode (in order to offer the AirPort Extreme a “proper” IP address on the internet (no Network Address Translation (NAT) — thus a ‘direct’ connection) the “IP address” and the “router” (default gateway)  address given to the AirPort Extreme are exactly the same. This is common with half-bridge mode implementations. In fact, I would argue that it’s the one thing that defines the source as a device offering a half-bridged connection.

Alas, under this condition, the AE’s internal programming decides that the IP address is invalid and falls back to a self-assigned, private IP, which is of course useless. Upgrading to the latest firmware (one x.x.1 step  up) made no difference unfortunately. (I seem to recall that even OS X on my iMac cannot cope with this, either. But I haven’t tested it recently.)

Interestingly, I was able to manually specify the exact same IP, gateway and DNS server addresses being offered by the DHCP server and guess what? It worked! But this is no solution when the IP address being offered by the ISP can change at any time.

Our ancient old LinkSys WRT54G handles this mode of operation flawlessly. Granted, it has custom firmware. But that firmware is also at least three years old. Half-bridge mode is not exactly rare — especially outside of the USA. Sure, there’s no real standard for the mode. But it’s been around for a long time now and I reckon most any modern router should handle all common variations — especially considering how completely not difficult that actually is.

I might have been prepared to settle for using the AE in bridge mode, so as to take advantage of Wireless-N and the shared hard disk or printer functions, which I did want. But alas, even over a 1Gb Ethernet link, hard disk performance was very poor. There’s also some strange problem with mounting my Apple formatted 1TB Seagate USB drive. It just doesn’t work. Again, Google reveals others with the same problem, though most seem to be OK in this instance.

So all in all, a very poor performer and, I’ll say it again, a big surprise from an otherwise excellent hardware/software developer such as Apple.

Nothing much can be done about the situation at my end. We’ll just have wait until Apple releases the AirPort Super-Mega-Duper-Extreme and fixed the couple lines of firmware source code to remedy things.

Meanwhile, we ended up with the latest offering from Belkin, with 2 USB ports for sharing a hard disk and a printer. This device seems to be working very well, with its built-in DSL2 modem to completely avoid that situation — and for a little less than the same money. (No Time Machine support though, which is a shame.)

We remain astonished, because we’re actually BIG Apple fans around here and have got ourselves thoroughly used to quoting the old, “It just works!” slogan, as well as the standard answer to frustrated Windows users, “Get a mac!” Ah well. No one is perfect.

But have you seen the new iPad 2 promo video yet? Apple hits another home run! Awesome.