Any Issues of the Airport Extreme Base Station

rr53891rr53891
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I am planning to purchase the new Airport Extreme Base Station to use with my MacBook for wireless printing to multiple printers via USB 2.0 Hub. I'm not comfortable yet in trying to read and write to an external hard drive wireless.



If anyone is doing this, does it work well?



Are there any hardware issues of teh Airport Extreme Base Station that anyone is aware?



Thank You



Rick

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    aniloanilo Posts: 7member
    My Linksys router died and I replaced it with the Apple Extreme Base Station, because I had an external drive I wanted to attach to my network.



    The router was setup within 15 minutes to work with my Mac, my PCs (including the old Win2K Dell) as well as the MyBook hard drive. The setup, using either the wizard or even manually is very straight forward in my opinion.



    However, the problems started when I wanted to setup my IP webcam (Panasonic BL-C131) through the router. Since the AEBS doesn't support UPnP, I had to do Port Mapping manually, but it never worked. I have spent hours this week to try different options but I still don't know why this doesn't work and I could not find any help on either Apple's support sites nor Panasonic's support site.



    I also can't get my wifes work computer to work through her VPN. My VPN works fine but apparently the Cisco VPN client has some issues.



    So I am returning this router tomorrow, the first Apple product I am really unhappy with, to get some ugly router that will hopefully work with everything on my network.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    carniphagecarniphage Posts: 1,984member
    Port mapping does work on the Airport Extreme, but it seems to cause a lot of people problems.



    Assigning fixed IPs to your network devices by making DHCP reservations is often the missing link.



    Apple implements its alternative version of UPnP (See NAT Port Mapping Protocol) but I am only aware of Azureus on the PC actually using it.



    If your household is mainly Mac then I would certainly recommend it. If you are mainly Windows - less so.

    I run only two PCs: An FTP server and a laptop that uses VPN. Don't have any problems, but I am quite good at fixing network problems.



    The external USB file server thing is great. I have a drive attached with lots of TV shows. These can be efficiently streamed to any machine in the house. It's fast (4-6 Megabytes per second) but not nearly as fast as a local drive.



    Once in a while the fileserver goes offline and I have to re-boot the router to bring it back to life. Don't be tempted to use it for iTunes or stuff like that.



    C.
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