maniacal rage

My new Airport Extreme Base Station arrived earlier this week and I finally got a chance to set it up last night. After some initial frustration caused by my VoIP phone router, which I eventually solved, I had the AEBS in place where a LinkSys 802.11G WiFi router used to be.

Previously, I had flashed said LinkSys router with the open-source DD-WRT firmware to add features LinkSys leaves out of its stock firmware and administration software—namely, the ability to reserve IP addresses for clients who regularly connect to the network and boost transmitter power.

Why are those two features important? The network setup in our apartment is all wireless and pretty continuous, so I'd rather every device that's normally connected always use the same IP (this makes it easier to open ports for various things like the XBOX 360). One side effect to having an all-wireless network in our apartment is the living room and office are separated by a few walls, one of which is filled with brick and plaster (an old fireplace chimney hiding behind a wall), absolutely murdering signal strength. The default LinkSys firmware's transmitter only uses 19mW (or ~13dBm) of power, which is considered very low. Using DD-WRT, you can safely up your transmission power to increase signal strength and this worked wonders in our apartment, giving the farthest item (the XBOX 360) a 75% signal instead of the 25% it had before the firmware change.

Everything worked really well—I only had to reboot the router once in over a year (compared to somewhat regular reboots with the default firmware), signal was strong, things were good. So why change to the Aiport Extreme Base Station? Two reasons: Airport Disk and wireless printer sharing.

Airport Disk could really be considered the reason I made the change, but wireless printing is great too. Before the AEBS, I had a little D-Link ethernet print server in my network, allowing me to share the USB printer with anyone on the network. This worked fine but it was an extra device, more power, more configuration to worry about. The AEBS has standard support for USB printer sharing, so I was able to get rid of this extra network device.

In fact, the great thing about the new AEBS is the ability to plug a USB hub in and connect both a printer and multiple disks, all of which work immediately. Within two seconds, I had my printer shared via Bonjour and my disks mounted over wireless on both of our computers. Airport Disk has all the functionality you would expect—it allows disks to sleep when not in use and wakes them up when you access them and it automatically mounts them when they become available on the network, if you wish. From the Airport Utility you can unmount drives from users as well.

The whole point of the Aiport Disk technology for me is simple: I want to move my music and pictures to a central network location that I can access from any computer. I want this because I want to save hard drive space on my MacBook Pro, and because I want Katia to be able to play all of our music as well (previously, she'd have to open my laptop and then browse my shared library in iTunes). Between the 40GB of photos and 20GB of music I've got, my 100GB MBP hard drive was filling up quickly. Back ups were slower. And it just didn't make sense to carry all that stuff around.

When I'm away from home, if I want to hear music I use my iPod. I don't need to carry my entire music library with me on two drives. And when I'm at home, I want to be able to hear my music no matter which computer I might be using (or over the stereo using Airport Express). Airport Disk allows you to do that.

The process for moving my music and photo libraries was a little nerve-wracking. After making a full back-up of my MBP, I copied all the media over to the external drive and hooked it up to the AEBS. To update iTunes, I did the following:

1. With iTunes not open, I copied the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file to the desktop.
2. Opened iTunes, changed the "iTunes Music folder location" to the network drive music folder. Quit iTunes.
3. Deleted all the music from my local machine, including the iTunes folder.
4. Opened the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file in TextMate and did some find/replace¹ on the paths.
5. Opened iTunes and ran File, Import... and chose the XML file I had just edited.
6. Waited about 30 minutes while iTunes looked at every file on the network.
7. Waited nearly three hours while iTunes determined gapless playback for all tracks again.

Why the gapless playback determination took so long, I don't know. In total time spent (including waiting), this was a long process, but it was worth it. Now when I open iTunes I can play all my music from my laptop without wasting space. Tonight I'm going to set up Katia the same way.

I've yet to handle the iPhoto library stuff, once I do that I'll report on how it goes.

All in all, I'm extremely pleased with the AEBS so far. Its stronger transmitter (100mW or 20dBm) is sending 98% signal to the XBOX 360, which is a near 25% improvement, even though I have it set to G/B compatible mode. It also allows for IP reservation. Granted, this is all making me yearn for an N card in my laptops, but in the mean time things are good and I've finally got hard drive space again.