Maximum being 70mW or the 250mW I think the WRT54G radios go to? Somebody did a plot of the output of a WRT54G at the maximum possible power and it was pretty distorted with significant interference with adjacent frequencies.

Yeah, but dd-wrt's got some nifty capabilities. I use mine as a repeater bridge to extend weak network signals. Tomato couldn't do that when I set it up (although that was over a year ago).

It all depends on how he wants to use it. I agree though, Tomato would seem to be a great fit for him as the QoS stuff is likely the only non-standard feature he'd use.

Almost as if my WAP had been reading this thread it decided this week its had enough and packed in!

What are the feelings about Apples Time Capsule or AirPort Extreme Base Station ??? I like the sound of the new wake features, but from what I can tell I may get better value getting the AirPort Extreme Base Station and an external hard drive for Time Machine ???

I'd also be interested to know of the wireless performance is actually any good, at the moment I have my AirPort Express plugging the gap and it's terribly unreliable with very poor range.

Cheers

Cris.

My Airport Extreme has worked well for me. Unfortunately I can't speak to its performance on N because I don't have any N devices.

Has anyone here had bad experiences with Time Machine? In recent months I've heard nothing but bad things. Horror stories about people trying to recover from catastrophic data loss and not being able to do it. I've heard Carbon Copy Cloner is much better.

But I'm not a Mac person, so I can't speak from experience...

Carbon Copy Cloner is just a UI for rsync. It's usable for a manual backup, and I suppose it can be automated with a cron job or other scheduler. It's not a replacement at all for Time Machine however which keeps incremental date-based backups.

I didn't say it did the same thing, just that it was supposed to be more reliable. I was just wondering if anyone had found that Time Machine did not live up to its promise. I've not heard great things.

Has anyone here had to restore from a Time Machine backup?

I have pulled test files from Time machine without a problem. It's reliable so long as it doesn't experience a failure - that's pretty much like anything.

Lately people on the Apple forums have been collecting stories of Time CAPSULE hardware failures - so I'm not sure if you've heard about those. I know Tom has used Time Machine with other shared volumes - maybe he'll chime in with some notes.

I have however had bad experiences with backups from a number of other methods, including the inability to boot from backups made with both SuperDuper as well as Carbon Copy Cloner.

Anyway, I just mentioned they're not at all the same thing because you had said that you'd heard "CCC was much better" - it's not better nor is it worse. It's just different. One might actually use both, as I do. Time Machine does my incremental backups to a Time Capsule and is on all the time. Then manually every now and then I will use CCC to copy everything to what should be a 1:1 bootable backup. I also use CCC to make backups of other external volumes, such as my music and movie drives.

I've got both an Express and an Extreme at home. I use the express to stream music into the kitchen/dining room and have the Extreme in the living room along with my Thomson modem. I used to have the extreme upstairs in the study but moved everything about to make the most of the available gigabit ports I needed in the study. According to the Network Utility my MBP connects at 130Mbit/s and without getting too carried away with benchmarks, I feel I get excellent throughput. My MBP is the only 5GHz N device I have, so everything else (phones, iTouch, Squeezebox, other Airport) connects at 2.4GHz.

I've not used the USB hard drive feature of the Extreme as I already use my ReadyNAS for stuff like that, although I've read it's not particularly speedy. For what I was doing I didn't think I needed a Time Capsule and also the fact it's only a single disc seems a little risky to me.

I quite like the idea of having everything in one box, but then there is the risk off all your eggs in one basket. I do however have a Drobo for critical client files backup and was thinking the Time Capsule would be more for the system drive only.

I also have Mozy backing up my Documents folder and MobileMe saving emails and favourites etc...

It seems quite a lot of money for what it is though, do you get goos range on the wireless ??? I have a few dead spots here, and they are even worse using the Express.

Cheers

Cris.

Time machine for me is the big feature of Leopard. I've had very few problems with it, using it in a variety of places. At home I have the Mac Pro and MacBook Air backing up to the ReadyNAS. No hacks, just checked the "Time Machine" option on the ReadyNAS and pointed the two Macs to it. I've done both small file restores and a full system restore on the Mac Pro without a problem.

At work I use the undocumented settings to allow it to back up to SMB. You can restore individual files this way, but you can't do a full recovery. However, a workaround is to move the backup to a USB drive for restore, and I've done this twice now with work machines to migrate to newer hardware, including from a PowerPC Mac to an Intel Mac.

For my family members, I get them Time Capsules. My mom has one used also as a wireless extender from her neighbor. This has backups for both my moms laptop, and the neighbor's Mac Mini. Neither have ever needed to use the restore feature, and they haven't told me about any problems backing up. It's a very set and forget method that works. My grandparents also have a laptop and mini pointed at theirs, and it's their main internet router. I use theirs as an offsite backup too. This works over MobileMe, by typing in my account to their router. This allows me to see it in the Finder on any of my Macs as if it were local. My long term plan here is to have my Pro sync some critical files to it weekly, though I haven't scripted that yet.

The only issues Time Machine has ever given me were under Leopard. I'd get the occasional error on my Pro that it couldn't find the backup drive. In the 2 weeks I've run Snow Leopard, I haven't seen the same error. Having both the hourly and long term backups has come in quite handy. If I am experimenting with something like addons for Warcraft, I can use Time Machine to bring things back to a baseline easily, without having to do manual separate backups. If an hour isn't small enough for my testing, I can initiate a new backup from the menu bar, and it takes only a few moments. I do have a few exclusions to prevent the backups from being large. At work, I excluded the Entourage database, as it's one monolithic file that Time Machine would back up every time. That's no longer an issue though as I've dumped Entourage. I do also exclude my local iDisk (~/Library/FileSync), since I feel having the files on every machine and Apple's servers is enough protection there, and I tend to not need the accidental deletion protection for it.

In the end, sure, some minor issues exist in Time Machine. But it's the first backup solution I use properly on every machine I work with. Carbon Copy Cloner works, but I really never used it much. Between the manual nature of setting it up, managing backup files, and so on, all it did was litter my NAS with things I'd have to clean up later. I think I still have a DMG on there somewhere of my PowerBook from 4 years ago.

I too am hearing stories of the power supplies dying around 17-18 months with the Time Capsules. While the units come with a 12 month warranty, a Mac with AppleCare will extend to cover the Time Capsule for the 3 years. So far the two I've deployed work fine, with the oldest approaching a year old now. If it's anything like the very first Apple Airport I bought in 99, it will probably turn into a cheep fix most resellers can handle in under a day. The sealed nature of the box does bother me though. The Extreme comes with an external power supply and no disk sealed inside, so I'm less concerned there.

As for wireless range, I use an Airport Extreme Dual Band as the main home router, then I have an Airport Express in my room. Both are hooked into the LAN, and this provides excellent 5GHz N coverage for the laptops anywhere in the house. With just the Extreme unit for 2.4 GHz, I still get good enough G coverage for my iPhone across a 1000sf area with 2 walls between them. It would have been fine for 5GHZ as well for normal web and video use, but I wanted the quickest network speeds possible for the Air when it's next to my Mac Pro. Comparing just the Extreme to my two previous routers, it has the best range on both 2.4 and 5GHz bands. The other routers I owned were a Linksys 610N (junk) and a Buffalo dual band router that due to the lawsuit and their laziness has become stuck at an older N spec version that isn't very compatible with modern systems.

At my grandparents house, the Time Capsule sits in the basement near the middle of the house, and provides coverage across both floors and even outside into their yard a decent ways. I can't speak for network speeds there much, but it's enough to carry on stable video chat sessions.

And the one at my moms house sits on the side of the house closest to their neighbor to extend the network. They live in an uncrowded area, so interference isn't an issue, and the extension is enough to cover her older house with strong signal, and provide coverage in her yard as well.

I've not looked into it far enough, but does Aiport Extreme + USB Drive == Time Capsule?

The UK Apple store has the Extreme at £139 and a 1TB Time Capsule at £229. This gives you £90 to spend on an enclosure and disc. Jump to a 2TB Time Capsule and the difference is £240! Now that's quite a chunk of money to spend on a single 2TB disc. In fact, for me, that was halfway towards a bare ReadyNAS that also has a ton of additional features as well.

I'm sure it's just the paranoid pseudo-sysadmin in me but, but if I value 'any' data then sticking it on a single disc doesn't seem safe.

I can see your point Tom about giving them to relatives as an install and forget solution, but if you're a seasoned fiddler then it seems like there are possibly cheaper but probably better ways getting the same functionality.

Yes. Apple says you had to have a Time Capsule, but this seems to have changed with 10.6. I plugged in a disk to my Airport, and Snow Leopard on my Air saw it as a valid backup destination, without any under the hood config tweaks. I'm letting it do a backup now, and will make sure it sees it as a valid restore option when booted off the Snow Leopard DVD.


If you only use a Time Capsule for backups, then the data is in two places, on the machine and on the Time Capsule. The risk comes in if you also use it as a normal NAS for file storage. You could plug in disks to the USB port on the Time Capsule, and backup the internal drive files to an external drive, though it's not an automated function of the Time Capsule, like it is on the ReadyNAS.

Ah, but you're not. You're sticking it on the original disk plus one more. And since you're frequently copying the data to the other disk, it's unlikely to go bad and you not notice.

Looks like it works fine, I was able to use the Time Machine restore option off the DVD, and have it see the backup I made. So under 10.6, an Airport Extreme Dual Band and 7.4.2 firmware, it works. YMMV.

*edit* oops. I see Tom posting that it works. I'm certain that it didn't at first, though, and I'm pretty sure it didn't work for a long time.

Re. the USB port on the Extreme:

Personally, I don't recommend the USB port if you're using Windows. It requires Bonjour to be installed, which works fairly for printers but I hate how it handles hard disks. Definitely not a good substitute for a NAS. I've also switched my family's "networked" printer from the Extreme USB to just a shared printer on my computer. It's just easier that way, and my computer is almost always on anyway.

Out of curiosity, I booted off my Leopard DVD that came with the Air (10.5.6), and it also saw the disk attached to the Airport Express for Time Machine restore. So from what I can tell, it's worked pre Snow Leopard without config changes, but may not be fully supported by Apple. Confusing to say the least. Some reports say it started working at 7.3.1.

I don't have Bonjour installed in Windows 7, and see the disk fine in Explorer just like any other share on the network.

Interesting.

Now, if only I could easily configure my Extreme in Windows 7. I had to find a "pirated" version of the airport software somewhere, and every time I launch it I have to do it in compatibility mode, which is obnoxious. All because I can't install off the disc in Windows 7, and I don't see Apple finally offering a downloadable, updated version of the utility. I guess I'll have to take a crack at XP virualization sometime. I don't care about the reasons they don't let you download the utility (we've discussed that in a previous thread), they just need to, for cases like this.

You mean like this?

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL840

Installed and worked fine for me on Windows 7 without compatibility mode or anything, and didn't require a disc. It did install Bonjour in the background, so it looks like it's required for configuration, but not any of the other features of the Airport.

Older versions also exist going back to 2003:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL537
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120273

Very interesting, but you're not exactly correct on one thing: that download was only available starting in June. Before that, if you owned an airport extreme (which has been out for at least two years now), you were out of luck, as the others you link are only for the express.

In the past, if you lost your disc you had to find someone else with an airport extreme and borrow theirs.

Anyway, I'm glad to see they finally got around to putting it up online. I still don't think it should have taken this long.

Version 5.4.2 was posted in June yes, but 5.4.1 was up in March, and 5.3.1 was up there in March of 2008, both stating support for your N based Extreme. The other links were for the older G based Express and Extreme, and the last link was for the really old B stations.

This does confirm needing the disc up till 5.1 though. No idea about 5.2 as I can't find a download for it anymore.

Whatever you do, don't buy a Linksys WRT160N. I was reluctant in buying this router for a friend of mine who has asked me to buy and install one for him because I had had many problems with the WRT54G in the past. But that was now a couple of years ago and I figured Linksys would've cleaned up their act by now.

They hadn't.

After a couple of days, my friend contacted me and said he had been having DNS problems with the router. The browser would give a DNS error on his PC which has a wired connection to the router. His daughter, who used a wireless connection with her laptop, didn't have this problem.

After two minutes of Googling, I had located the problem.

It seems there are two versions of this router: the first one (V1) used a Broadcom chipset and was pretty decent it seemed. Unfortunately, in all their wisdom, Linksys changed the chipset to the pretty unknown RT2880F chip, V2 of the router. That's where the trouble started.

This problem has existed now for almost a year, but still Linksys has not done anything about it. A first they blatantly denied the existence of the problem, now they are ignoring it. It seems the first firmware was pretty decent, but left you vulnerable for a DNS exploit. For this they released an update which patched the exploit, but broke the router entirely. They only thing currently to do is re-flash the router with the old firmware (found here) and use the DNS servers of OpenDNS to avoid becoming a victim of the DNS exploit to which your're vulnerable again then of course. Harly an ideal situation, but if the shop won't take the thing back, it's about all you can do.

In any case this will absolutely be the very last Linksys product I've ever bought! I'm truly disgusted by how Linksys treats their customers so they won't be seeing any more money from me. IMO, Cisco made a big mistake putting their well respected name on POS hardware like this.

As far as I can tell, most consumer level routers are horribly broken in some way. Some of them are broken at a basic level, other don't break until you start doing something interesting with them.

Linksys does this all the time, and it's one of the reasons I tend to also skip considering them for much of anything. I still remember helping a friend load Windows 2000 on his machine with a Linksys network card. There were 6 versions of the card, sharing the same model number. Each one had different drivers, and in most cases loading the wrong one would bluescreen the machine.

This taught me way back then that their push to drive down cost was going to drive up my time having to deal with supporting the products.

I had figured they might have improved after being acquired by Cisco, and so I bought a 610N when Circuit City imploded. 3 weeks later I replaced it with an Airport Extreme.

Yeah, it's to bad, really, because when they first came out with their blue metal-enclosure hubs and switches, they worked really well. They were a nice step between consumer crap and too-expensive commercial products. Now they're just consumer crap like everything else.

I don't know guys, I think this might be a case of "I hate company x. I've bought 37 things from them and they all failed miserably. I'll never buy from them again, and only buy from company y." We had a hard drive discussion like that a while back.

I've had very few bad experiences with Linksys products. Sure, I've had some, but no more than other products in this space. If anything, I've had better luck with them.

Whatever experience you've had, I have had nothing but good experiences running a WRT54GL with Tomato installed. Yes, I've had a router go bad (just happened two days ago, actually), but it ran for 2 years, and only cost $50.

My issues with Linksys are mostly over their model and version confusion. Trying to use or support their devices are a nightmare. I don't want to go to a website, pick Model 42399 and then be presented with pictures to try and help me decide what version the device actually is, especially when it's an internal NIC. They have made no effort towards streamlining this mess in 9 years, and I'm not sure exactly how much more time I have to give them to not come off as a person who dislikes their products for irrational reasons.

If your going to radically change the internals of a device enough to require new firmware or drivers, make universal driver packages, or make a new model. Most companies do this, Linksys doesn't.

You're saying that a Linksys product is good but only after you've replaced a core component of it.

I never said that. I said I indeed had problems with them in the past, but, exactly because I didn't want to be biased, I decided to give them another try. Stupid me I guess.

I also didn't say I'll only buy products from brand Y. I only know I'll never buy Linksys products again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice,... well you know. By now I've been burned five times or so by Linksys. I think that's enough, don't you?

I also agree with Tom. If you start changing internal components, up to the point where you'll need to use different drivers, you either need to give the product a new name, or develop universal driver packages. The way they do it now just won't do.
Trevor also puts his finger exactly on the sore spot. Much of the WRT54G model's success has to be accredited to Tomato or DD-WRT. The model by itself is pretty basic otherwise.

I hear where you're coming from and I know what you mean, but that isn't what I meant, at least.

I don't think they're any worse than D-Link or Belkin or Netgear or anyone else of that class. I just think that they used to make quality products in the mid-range arena, and now they make the same low-end crap everyone else does.

Also, it just occurred to me that I'm thinking about Netgear and not Linksys. Linksys has always been crap. Netgear, on the other hand, was created by a big player in the network space (Bay Networks, since purchased by Nortel and run into the ground) to fill that niche. I could buy a product with a reduced feature set from commercial equipment, but with its quality for a 200% instead of 800% markup. Add onto that that there's no one left in that mid-range market that they created, and it pisses me off.