David J Rice

When my lovely second hand Netgear Rangemax router died I bought one of these new fangled AirPort Extreme Base Stations from Apple with the logic that;

• Hey it’s Apple it’ll just work with the rest of my computers
• It will be fast as fcuk thanks to the 802.11n
• It will be able to handle my ever increasing download traffic
• I was wrong…

Update: So apple have finally fixed this issue in the airport extreme update (firmware version 7.3.1) released last wednesday. I installed it straight away and have had no issues at all, huzzah! Thanks apple, finally I can say I recommend this product.

So while yes it is pretty, and it was a snap to setup my network something rather strange started happening. I would have really great connectivity for about an hour then the router would die, the little green light on the front would go amber and nothing would happen. The only solution being to pull the plug from the router and wait for it to restart.

I went investigating the problem and it seems like always it wasn’t just me affected by a crashing router. The best write-up I found on the issue was from the excellent codelaide software they actually write a really useful utility for the mac called Lighthouse for dynamic port mapping so I would consider them an authority on the subject. In the article (which is albeit focused on their application) they reveal that it is actually a BUG in the AirPort Extreme Firmware (Version 7.2.1), yes folks you heard it. A BUG with Apple software. It is with the NAT/PMP server receiving requests that are perfectly valid NAT/PMP request but the router just shits itself and dies.

While the AirPort Extreme has been out for a while, it is available in two flavours now “Fast Ethernet” and Gigabit Ethernet. The fast ethernet version has been around for a while, if you have one of those and are experiencing these problems count yourself lucky. Just do the following;

• Open the AirPort Utility
• Hold down option and select Check for updates
• Download AirPort Extreme Firmware (Version 7.1.1)
• Install that firmware on your base station
• Relax

Now if you are like I and bought the Gigabit Ethernet version you will notice that there is only firmware versions 7.2 and 7.2.1, there is nothing lower this is the factory shipped software, with a bug in it. Now you can downgrade to 7.2 and I would really advise you doing that, although it doesn’t stop the base station from dying it does restart itself afterwards saving a little bit of the inconvenience. The only other thing you can do is turn off any bittorrent client you have running, while it won’t cut it out completely it will reduce the chance of it happening quite a bit.

So I phoned up Apple to discuss and well to cut a long story short they wanted to give me a new router no matter how much I explained to them that a firmware issue will be on every piece of hardware. Failing that they wanted me to make the long journey Mac-Sys, now they’re great guys but I don’t think even Steve Wozniak himself would be able to do anything. No matter how much I pressed or argued the fact or wanted to read out URLS for further info they were absolute in the fact that there is not a bug with their software. Well there is, and it seems to be getting worse every release please Apple acknowledge your dodgy software and fix the bugs, the last time you released an update to it was on August 29th 2007 what the hell have you been doing?

Anyway, that’s enough of a rant just don’t buy an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (at least until they get their act together) buy a Netgear Rangemax instead.

Update: So apple have finally fixed this issue in the airport extreme update (firmware version 7.3.1) released last wednesday. I installed it straight away and have had no issues at all, huzzah! Thanks apple, finally I can say I recommend this product.