Testing the new AirPort Extreme

So one of my colleagues bought the new Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station for work but the Network Security Guru wasn't going into the office until after the weekend, so he lent the APE router to test to see if it's the right device for me.

I'll skip the beautiful aesthetics of the unit and cut straight to the features and functionality. At first glance, the setup was easy...it was slightly more technical than your average Apple setup wizard, but given the highly-technical nature of this type of device, that can be forgiven. At first, I noticed that many of the router options were not present. It wasn't until after awhile that I discovered that I was playing in the "simple" mode and not the advanced "manual" mode where all the advanced security settings were hiding.

After I got that figured out I started playing with the security settings. I should first mention that anyone who has used a typical router admin screen from Linksys or D-Link, using the Airport Utility is completely different since the admin requires a software application and the router cannot be configured via a web admin. Since it's an application, it looks completely different than your average web admin, so it may be confusing if you've configured other routers.

That being said, I actually found it a bit more difficult to find some of the settings I'd normally be able to find pretty quickly, such as MAC address filtering, shutting off SSID broadcasting, dialing down signal strength, etc.

One HUGE absolutely annoying issue I was running into was that any setting that I made and updated the router required a reset of the router, which meant it rebooted...and rebooting the device was not a fast process.

In addition, I had to reset the router 3 times to its default factory settings before I got my settings to work properly and finally stick.

Okay, so since I don't have a working printer, but I do have a USB hard drive, I gave the Airport Disk a try. At first I plugged in the drive into the USB port of the router, and something didn't happen right. I'm not quite sure but the USB drive did not show up in the Airport Utility admin. I had to reset the router...again, and then it finally showed up.

Setting up the security for the Airport Disk was easy and worked flawlessly with my MacBook Pro. I was able to see the disk, and was restricted to my assigned share. Data transfer was BLAZINGLY FAST, even in mixed mode (b/g/n compatible). I transferred a 12 GB VMWare image that was on the USB drive and it took about 11 minutes. I then transferred about 70 image files that were about 700 kb each to the USB drive and it performed that transfer in under a minute. The speed of data transfer was better than what I had hoped.

One other strange kept occuring...I had set up the router as it's own wireless network. When I went to switch wireless to and from my main wi-fi network, it wouldn't show the Airport Disk when I browsed my network until I performed a reset of the router. It was able to connect to the router fine, but I had to nudge it to get the disk to show up.

Okay, after figuring out that I should be using WPA/WPA2 Personal as my WPA setting, I finally got my 2 Windows PCs to connect to the network. It was excruciatingly difficult for my older eMachine laptop to connect mainly because of the older WPA setting would only work with its wireless network adapter. By big beef is with the inability for my Windows machines to see the Airport Disk on the network. I wasn't able to browse to it through a Windows Explorer through the "browse entire network" option, but I was able to connect to it by its UNC path. It worked but it wasn't very fast trying to connect to it. When I finally connected to the drive, I browsed to those image files that I had placed on the USB drive and tried to browse through them through the Filmstrip view in Explorer. It took several seconds for each preview to be generated on-the-fly so it was faster than my existing Buffalo NAS device, but it's not as fast as I had hoped.

I was conclude that as far as Airport Disk functionality was concerned, file transfer was good, and definitely as expected, if not better. Using it as a file server, it may not be as good as a real file server.

Of course, your mileage may vary.