We recently purchased a new computer for Jenn, the new (1st generation black-backed) iMac. It has 802.11n draft 2.0 at this time. As you may or may not know, 802.11n is a significant speed and range boost in wireless technology. However, you can only gain this boost by having an 802.11n router. So, when I purchased Leopard, I also decided to purchase the AEBS with gigabit ethernet. It was a good thing I didn’t purchase it when first came out, 1) I didn’t need when it first came out 2) I wouldn’t have seen any speed improvements over my current router, and 3) I wouldn’t have gotten gigabit enet. That’s right, apparently Apple re-evaluated the base station after it was out for a bit and decided to add gigabit enet on a quiet hardware update to the model.
Overall, I like the AEBS, but I do have some issues with it and apparently the router has issues with disks.
Pros:
1) Provides better signal strength than my aging Belkin 802.11g router (I think I got it in 2002!). This appears to be true for even 802.11g clients (my laptop).
2) I CAN achieve an “Open” NAT on my xBox 360. When I got the router, I had the 360 set as a static IP - I think that’s what Apple calls it. Anyhow, the router sees the 360 and its MAC address. Upon seeing the MAC address it will always map it to a certain DHCP internal address (in my case 192.168.2.5). I have the 360 network settings set to the same manual IP (and subnet mask 255.255.0.0 (more on this in the review later)). Then, also upon getting the router, I forwarded the correct ports to that 192.168.2.5 address (ports 88 and 3074 I think) - google xBox live ports and you should get the correct ones for sure. BANG open NAT. I’m not sure about other settings, but this worked for me - ONE drawback though (see cons of the router below. Considering the many reports that the base station will not work with a 360, I think I did pretty well. (Yes, this was a risk I took when I bought the router). I think many of those reports were for the older base stations though.
3) gigabit enet. Now, I know the overhead in wireless, even at 802.11n speeds, makes 100BaseT still faster than 802.11n (I think I actually looked into this once), but for the devices plugged in wireless on the gigabit enet, the gigabit enet will make all those devices network faster. So, lets say I’m doing a hug file copy from Jenn’s computer (wireless 802.11n) from the server (wired gigabit enet). The file copy would go pretty slow. If I switched Jenn’s computer over to an enet wired connection on 100baseT, the copy would go faster. However, the base station and Jenn’s computer are gigabit enet by default, so the connection would really be a 1000baseT connection, and the file copy would go, potentially, more than 10x faster than if it were a wireless 802.11n connection. In short, the gigabit enet makes faster wired connections, perfect for file servers/transfers.
Cons:
1) Apple chose to drop doing Leopard time machine ™ back-ups over airport disks (a couple days before Leopards release also). Now, there are work arounds for this (like plugging the disk in locally, setting up TM to use it, then making the disk NAS (”AirDisk”) on the router, or doing certain terminal commands), but I think I found the REAL reason why the feature was removed by default. The reason is, NAS SUCKS on this router. I plugged in my disk to it, it recognized it just fine, and after I figured out that it created a folder called “Shared” on the root of the disk as was using that folder alone for the mount point (sharepoint) of the disk (I thought it would use the root of the disk) I realized that AirDisk was actually working. So, what is so bad? Well, in my many google searching trying to realize the sharepoint of the disk, I came across many thread postings on and off Apple support forums. These threads allege that disk corruption can occur on the AirDisks during normal operation (specifically when copying files to the disk (core functionality of time machine)). On a disk I connected but never copied stuff to, I had no corruption, but on the other disk I copied a dinky test text file I got volume bit map errors in the Leopard disk utility. So, according to my tests, AIRDISK DOES CORRUPT DISKS. This a a HUGE flaw. What kind of functionality do you gain from backing up your data using time machine if you can not trust your backup data? Thus, I think Apple removed this functionality by default. Hopefully, an AEBS firmware update and maybe Leopard update will come to enable this functionality by default again. I say “again” because it apparently was enabled by default in the beta releases of leopard (see Appleinsider #1 and #2). A forum posting also was able to conclude that these volume bit map errors were a reason why they were unable to login to the AirDisk occiasionally. There were other forum postings dealing with the AirDisk magically disappearing randomly from the Finder (allegedly even on wired connections), however I was never connected long enough to the AirDisk to see this issue. Typically, the fix to this was to restart the AEBS. Maybe a firmware update will fix this issue other people are having also?
2) Dude, why can’t I change my subnet mask? Pretty much the rest of the industry defaults to a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. Apple, for some reason, chose 255.255.0.0. Not a big hassle to change all my devices to a 255.255.0.0 subnet, but I’d like much more just to change the one subnet mask setting in the router (instead of several connected device settings). It seems that Apple only wants you to change settings it wants you to change (I guess in keeping inline with their ideas of keeping things/interfaces simple), however not having the ability to change some other lower-level settings (UPnP for instance) if I need to is a bit discomforting to me, and probably to most other power-users.
3) For some reason, and this may require more experimentation, my xBox 360 doesn’t hop online automatically. The only work around is to start up the xBox with the eject button, so it doesn’t load the game, but instead tosses you in the dashboard, then go to system->test xBox live. The test always comes back as everything ok and open NAT (unless the internet is down for whatever reason). After doing that test though, I can login to xBox live no problem, load a game, like Halo 3, and play away. Strange that the xBox would connect automatically no problem with the OLD Belkin 2002 router, but the new router it screws up with. (BTW, I could NEVER get the old router to open NAT (it wouldn’t let me forward one of the necessary ports)).
4) At least they added a couple more wired ports to this model of the AEBS, however, most routers come with 4 LAN ports. 1 more would’ve been nice.
Summary-
AirDisk functionality is flawed, but, for me, the other functions of the router (802.11n, open NAT, and gigabit enet) seem to make up for it (at this time).
If you’re looking for a star rating, I’ll give it 4/5 stars.
Notes: I was not able to test the connectivity of AirPort disks over the internet like connecting to my AirDisk over a connection in a different state. Upon seeing corrupted disks I ran. There does seem to be a setting to allow this in the Airport Utility though. I may update this posting in the future if AirDisk corruption is fixed and I am able to test this functionality.
I also did not test the printer sharing function of the AEBS since my laptop is doing the printer sharing for the house.