802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station

Alexander Hoffman wrote:
> My new AirPort Extreme Base Station was delivered today at 9am. I just
> for my official shipment notification last night at 7:50, so that was
> kinda fast. Shanghai to Brooklyn over a weekend (FedEx says it left
> there on Satuday)!

If it was sorted at the FedEx airport warehouse and routed from there to
your office: there would not have been so many traffic jams between
Shanghai & you. Also they are a day ahead of you; but watch out ~ next
year they will be two years ahead of us...

George

I was thinking about getting the Airport Extreme .. Now that a few of my Macs are enabled for 802.11n ;-) Can you confirm/deny that it supports Static DHCP'? This is a must for me. But .. I must say that I'm disappointed that the Ethernet ports are only 10/100

Thanks

I've finally hooked up a USB external hard disk to my new base station.

It's very easy to set up access to the drive. I could set up read &
write access with the base station password or a different password.
For each, I could set guest access to be either a) not allowed, b)
read access or c) read and write access.

I also can set up individual accounts. Very easy to do. Each account
has read, read/write or no access allowed. Of course, all of this is
quite easy to do using the new AirPort Utility (the replacement for
the old AirPort Admin Utility).

----

While doing some other things, I did a few quick speed tests.

First, I tried copying three different things across the network. I
tried to copy my Eudora folder (365MB, with lots of little files in
there), a folder with a bunch of large PDFs (48.9 MB) and a
downloaded television episde from the iTunes store (521MB,
"Downloaded," appropriately enough). For each, I timed how long it
took to duplicate locally and to copy to the base station's drive.
(Times include "preparing to copy" time.)

Eudora Folder(365MB)
duplicate: 48s
copy to: 495s
copy from: 241s

PDFs (48.9 MB)
duplicatate: 7s
copy to: 50s
copy from: 36s

iTunes TV episode (521 MB)
duplicate: 36s
copy to: 212s
copy from: 168s

So, copying from the base station's drive is notable faster than
copying to. OK. Both, obviously, are a fraction of the speed of local
disk.

----

The new base stations can do a few different modes, all of which
include 802.11n. There's b/g compatible, a compatible, n only (5GHz),
and n only (2.4GHz). The default, which I will continue to use, is
the b/g compatible mode. I tried copying the same 521MB file to the
drive in the two n only modes..

copy (n only 5mhz) to: 186s
copy (n only 2.4mhz) to: 201s

Then, just to double check, I tried to copy the 521MB file again, in
the default mode.
copy to: 181s

And THEN, I got off my couch and sat down in a chair a few feet from
the basestation.
copy to (near): 174s

And last, I tried using diskspeed bench x to check the speed in each mode:
near: 3197343 (167 seconds)
softa: 3144795 (170 seconds)
n only (2.4Ghz): 3070921 (175 seconds)
n only (5GHz): 3246764 (165 seconds)
local disk: 29476675 (18.2 seconds)

There does not appear to be significant differences in speed between
the different modes. Note: all these tests were done with just my MBP
awake.

----

Most disturbing note: the Eudora copy from time struck me as WAY too
low, so I tried to do it again. I got 187s, even faster than I
thought was a mistake.

So, copying times are quite variable. I don't mean that there are
large margins of error (+- just a second or so), but rather than the
phenomenon itself varies.

But DAMN is this easy to use.

--
=Alex Hoffman
Leadership Policy & Politics
Teachers College, Columbia University

>I was thinking about getting the Airport Extreme .. Now that a few
>of my Macs are enabled for 802.11n ;-) Can you confirm/deny that it
>supports Static DHCP'? This is a must for me. But .. I must say that
>I'm disappointed that the Ethernet ports are only 10/100

Confirm (see #7 below).

There is a DHCP tab that allows:

1) Selection of the range for address
    a) 10.0 (default)
    b) 192.168
    c) 172.16 (this one is new to me)
You set the third byte (default = 1).

2) The DHCP beginning address (default = 10.0.1.2).

3) The DHCP ending address (default = 10.0.1.200)

4) The lease time (in minutes, hours or days) (default = 4 hours)

5) DHCP message (default = blank)

6) LDAP server (default = blank

7) DHCP reservations. You can reserve particular IP addresses by MAC
address or DHCP client ID, and the reservations CAN be mix of the two.

--

=Alex Hoffman
Leadership Policy & Politics
Teachers College, Columbia University

>Can you share only the entire drive or individual folders within the drive?

The drive being shared has two partitions.

These volumes are shared together, or the are not shared. They are
not individually controllable, at least not that that I can tell.
That is, there is read/write access to all of them, just write access
or no access. Individual disks, volumes or folder cannot not have
different permissions.

I would think that this is because the Base Station is controlling
access to its USB port, but not doing anything to whatever is
attached to the USB port. It is not storing any information on the
disks, or modifying the disks for its own purposes. Nor does it have
any sort of representation of the disks stored internally. It's just
a gate keeper, where the gate is the USB port. It does know or care
what is on the other side.

--
=Alex Hoffman
Leadership Policy & Politics
Teachers College, Columbia University

I am thinking of using an AE attached hard drive to help with backing up my wife's MacBook (ala the recommendations in Taking Control of Backing Up Your Mac about having both duplicates and archives). So the question is this:

Any idea if Retrospect will be able to create or maintain a bootable duplicate if the duplicate partition is mounted over the network?

Thanks!

On Feb 13, 2007, at 11:36, danwilson wrote:

> I am thinking of using an AE attached hard drive to help with
> backing up my wife's MacBook (ala the recommendations in Taking
> Control of Backing Up Your Mac about having both duplicates and
> archives). So the question is this:
>
> Any idea if Retrospect will be able to create or maintain a
> bootable duplicate if the duplicate partition is mounted over the
> network?

Once the drive is mounted then Retrospect just writes to it . . .I
don't think it cares if it's a local or network volume. I can't
recall off hand if Retrospect will make a bootable backup though.

There are also currently some throughput issues with drives attached
to the new AE base station; there have been some reports over on the
macosx-talk list about it.

Nothing that can't be fixed by a firmware upgrade of course . . .and
I would imagine that Apple is watching and will work on reported
problems.

Alexander Hoffman wrote:
> My new AirPort Extreme Base Station was delivered today at 9am. I just
> for my official shipment notification last night at 7:50, so that was
> kinda fast. Shanghai to Brooklyn over a weekend (FedEx says it left
> there on Satuday)!
>
Saturday in Shanghai might be Friday in NYC. 50% more time in shipping.