Fixing a broken WDS wired to wireless bridge on an Apple Airport Express

Subtitle: Who is Henry B, and why has he posted about 35,000 times to Apple's support site?

I recently bought an Apple Airport Express (discount) to stream AirTunes music to my compact AudioSource amplifier (inputs are Airport Express and iPod, output to local Mission and remote AudioSource speakers). I was unhappy with the usability of AirTunes (though TuneConnect is helping!), so I decided to investigate a SlimDevices Squeezebox. I figured I'd hook the Squeezebox up to the wired ethernet port on the Airport Express, and use the AExpBS simply as a WDS network extender and a wired to wireless bridge.

Problem was, when I tested with my iBook, the bridge didn't work. The iBook reported the ethernet cable was not connected. Research led nowhere (several sites mentioned that the AExpBS didn't support bridging using WPA encryption, but that's dated, it does now). In desperation, I tried Apple Discussions.

It worked. "Henry B." (level "four", @35K posts), who I hope is a pseudonym for many persons, came up with a response that worked:

Apple - Discussions - WDS bridge not working

...I should be able to use an AEX in WDS mode to connect an ethernet device to my WLAN, using the the AEX as a bridge.

It's not working here. All theWDS settings seem fine. I can stream to the AEX and use it extend my WLAN. If I plug an ethernet cable into it, however, no joy. My iBook says there's nothing plugged in.

...

1. Do a factory reset of your Airport Express to get it back into a known state per:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=108044

2. Make sure your Powerbook, Airport Extreme Base Station, and Airport Express are all - for now - in the same room.

3. With your Powerbook connected to the wireless network of the Airport Extreme Base Station (prove it by making sure you have internet access) run the Airport Admin Utility. We are going to have you clean up some settings on it first:

• make sure the Base Station is running firmware version 5.5.1. If not ...
  install firmware 5.5.1 on the Base Station:
  http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airportextremefirmware551formacosx.html
  and 6.1.1 on the Airport Express:
  http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airportexpressfirmware611formacosx.html
  WPA on a WDS network works perfectly with these firmware versions.
  

• under the Airport tab, make sure you have NOT checked the box to "create a closed network"
• under the Access Control tab, remove ALL table entries
• under the WDS tab, remove all entries and uncheck all boxes

Then update settings to the Airport Base Station.

4. Make sure you have the Airport 4.1 update installed on your Mac:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airport41formacosx.html

5. Now run the Airport Setup Assistant. Use its guidance to configure the Airport Express as a new base station that "extends" the existing wireless network created by the Airport Extreme Base Station.

Incredibly, this worked. The bridge was restored. I noticed two things with this process:

1. After I'd installed the firmware 'downgrades' on both base stations I couldn't connect wirelessly to the Airport Extreme, I had to reset it first.
2. When I ran Airport Setup Assistant it complained that I didn't have IPv6 enabled (it's disabled on my older 10.3.9 machine). I skipped that step and it then hung after locating my base station. I went back and enabled IPv6 and it completed successfully.

Was it the firmware downgrade that did the trick, or was it enably IPV6 on the iBook?
I wonder if bridging from wired to WAN using a WPA encrypted WDS configured Airport Express Base station requires IPv6 ...

In any case, it's a relief not to have to call Apple tech support!

The latest programming fad: Ruby on Rails

I guess I have to figure out what this one is. O'Reilly is always the best source: ONLamp.com: Rolling with Ruby on Rails.

What is Ruby?

Ruby is a pure object-oriented programming language with a super clean syntax that makes programming elegant and fun. Ruby successfully combines Smalltalk's conceptual elegance, Python's ease of use and learning, and Perl's pragmatism. Ruby originated in Japan in the early 1990s, and has started to become popular worldwide in the past few years as more English language books and documentation have become available.

What is Rails?

Rails is an open source Ruby framework for developing database-backed web applications. What's special about that? There are dozens of frameworks out there and most of them have been around much longer than Rails. Why should you care about yet another framework?

What would you think if I told you that you could develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you could with a typical Java framework? You can--without making any sacrifices in the quality of your application! How is this possible?

Part of the answer is in the Ruby programming language. Many things that are very simple to do in Ruby are not even possible in most other languages. Rails takes full advantage of this. The rest of the answer is in two of Rail's guiding principles: less software and convention over configuration...

OS X Tiger includes the Ruby interpreter.

MacWorld: Secrets of Safari

MacWorld did secrets of Firefox a while back. Now they do Safari. News to me! I never even noticed the 'add to iPhoto Library' feature.

Controlling Apple AirTunes with SlimServer, or how I was turned to the Darkseid

I've been around long enough to know how pernicious and nasty these DRM (digital rights management) schemes are. I knew sooner or later they'd turn me to the Darkseid where one skirts the edges of the foul abyss of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. (DMCA badness befouls both Republicans and Dems alike.)

So my 3,500 iTunes tunes are 99.99% from our large CD library. Only a few are AppleStore FairPlay DRMd. Still, they are largely AAC, which is theoretically an open (mp4) standard. All the same, I've been cautious.

Good. Because Apple has broken their implied contract. The contract worked like this:

1. We will grudgingly accept Apple's four DRM scheme as the best of a bad bunch.
2. Apple will provide us solutions that work.

With their failure to provide a half-decent remote control solution for iTunes/AirTunes Apple has left us with no good way to stream music from a server based iTunes library to an AirTunes speaker. Even the Keyspan remote is a weak solution. We needed an Apple solution at least as good as the SoundBridge and SlimDevice solutions; Apple has persistently failed to provide.

So it's with a clear conscience that I now skirt the twilight zone of SlimServer, the iTunes LAME plug-in, and even (dare I mention the word?) JHymm (though the last is least important). Solutions that are legal today, but certainly unpleasing to Apple.

Thus far the results are remarkably better than my attempts with AirTunes (I walk upstairs to adjust the volume?!), TuneConnect (no playlists, still this is very promising) and NetConnect (disappointing). At the moment SlimServer and iTunes are running on my iMac upstairs in a background user session. SlimServer is reading in AAC files, transcoding them using the iTunes LAME plug-in, and streaming them as high quality .mp3 files to iTunes. iTunes is then transcoding them to FLAC (I think) files and streaming them to my remote AirPort Express, the music then plays on my speakers. I can control play from a web browser on my iBook, or I could use the Java softsqueeze app for remote control. This cost nothing, though it all works better if one buys the Squeezebox hardware remote.

Weird. Kludgy. Hard setup with a few odd bugs I had to work around. Limited documentation. Had to download and install several pieces. It will all work better, of course, the further I move from Apple's DRM vision.

I hope they're listening. Apple has the capability to provide a great solution, but they're choosing to really irritate their customers.

Spotlight can now index OpenDocument files (OpenOffice, NeoOffice/J)

NeoLight (NeoOffice Spotlight Importer) - Spotlight Plugins: "A plug-in that allows Spotlight to index metadata and content within the files created by NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org. It is compatible with documents generated by NeoOffice/J 0.8.4, NeoOffice/J 1.1, OpenOffice.org 1.x, and OpenOffice.org 2.0 (OpenDocument)."

Kensington Stereo Dock for iPod

The alternative to using Apple's new integrated cradle: Amazon.com: Electronics: Kensington 33164 iPod StereoDock Charger and Transmitter for iPod, iPod Mini, iPod Nano or iPod Photo.

I wonder if it really charges the G3 (rest can charge via USB).

Aperture -- not for the iMac?

I'm getting bad vibes about Apple's Aperture.

The video card in the iMac I bought a few months ago is not supported. In fact, neither is the video card in the iMac they're selling now.

Here's the supported list:

One of the following graphics cards: ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition; ATI Radeon X850 XT; ATI Radeon 9800 XT or 9800 Pro; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro; ATI Radeon 9600 XT, 9600 Pro, or 9650; ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 or 9600; NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL or 6800 GT DDL; NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT; NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500

My 3 month old iMac has an ATI Radeon 9600. The new iMac has an

ATI Radeon X600 Pro (17-inch model) or X600 XT (20-inch model) graphics processor with 128MB of DDR memory.

And yet the G4 PowerBook's card (ATI Mobility) is on the list.

Did Apple explicitly decide to shut out the iMac customer base? If they did, they will lose me as a customer.

Update: My buddy Andrew dug deeper in the tech specs and found a different list. Looks like this was a marketing error. The iMacs qualify. Phew. I want this software!

• ATI Radeon x600 Pro or x600 XT
• ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition
• ATI Radeon X850 XT
• ATI Radeon 9800 XT or 9800 Pro
• ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
• ATI Radeon 9600, 9600 XT, 9600 Pro, or 9650
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 or 9600
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE or 6600
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL or 6800 GT DDL
• NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
• NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500