So, I’ve got an Apple Airport Extreme wireless router. I used to have an old Netgear, which worked OK, except that it kept dropping the connection to my laptop and couldn’t get a signal upstairs. So, I dropped the money on an Airport Extreme (and an Airport Express to stream music to the stereo), and all was good.
Well, most things were good. The signal strength was very good, and my connection was nice and steady, and streaming the music collection to the stereo was a nice trick. The Airport Extreme has some things I don’t like, though. Unlike most routers, which can be configured through a browser, the Airport Extreme insists that you install an application just to configure it. (Apple doesn’t offer the configuration application for Windows 2000, either.) Once you get the application working, it does fine, except when it doesn’t. (That should be Apple’s slogan — It Just Works, Except When It Doesn’t.) There’s no way to see what devices are connected. Port forwarding (or, as Apple calls it, port mapping) works sometimes, deletes rules randomly, and just refuses to work at other times. I can’t use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop client to get to my computer at work any more. Every time you change a setting, the router needs to restart.
But hey, other than having to go to work to work, none of these problems were severe. Except when my wife’s work VPN client comes up dead one fine morning. No VPN equals no work, and no work equals no pay, so she called up the IT staff (that’s me) and told me to figure it out.
It worked fine up until last week, I say. The connection’s fine, her coworkers say the server’s up, her other internet apps are fine. It’s just timing out during login.
I spend the requisite twenty minutes screwing around with settings before doing what one should always start with — heading to Google. Lo and behold, Apple’s newest firmware manages to break VPN connectivity for a number of common VPN clients. Yep, I remember updating the firmware recently. Yep, rolling back the firmware to the previous version fixes things. To Apple’s credit, it’s easy to find a guide explaining how to roll back the firmware.
According to the consensus on the forums, the newest update seems to have broken VPN connectivity with Nortel clients but fixed connectivity with SonicWall clients. My wife uses a SonicWall client. Your guess is as good as mine. As a bonus, I can now remote desktop into my work computer.
I never could get our airport extreme to effectively connect to our PCs with WEP128 (apparently, Apple prefers WPA and only uses low-security WEP). That and it took herculean effort and animal sacrifices to get the Airport to play nice either direction – with the hardware firewall/VPN for work or with Charter’s twitchy cable modem.
The solution – recycle the thing and replace it with a Cisco gateway that has the c-modem, firewall, and wireless router all in one box. Good thing my wife now has a software VPN. And yes, being able to configure it by HTTP login is a blessing.
I’ve got one addition for your new apple slogan.
“Apple: It just works. As long as you only use Apple products and let them do all your thinking for you.”
Comment by Charlie — April 15, 2008 @ 4:55 am