Reconfiguring an Airport Express to WDS and switching from home to travel configuration

My Airport Express (why, oh why, couldn't Apple make the USB port powered?!) went traveling with me. When it came home I had to restore it to its usual duty -- extending my base station. It took me a while to remember how to do this [note: see two updates below, including use of the Configuration (profiles). Basically you:

1. try a hard reset first. If that doesn't work do a factory reset (MacWorld ref article on resets - since I wrote this I've found the factory reset more useful).

• To perform a hard reset, push and hold the reset button for 10 full seconds with the AE powered the whole time.
• Release the button, and AirPort Express will reset.
• For the factory reset, unplug first. Press and hold the reset button and, while holding it, plug in the AirPort Express (this is a pain in the butt to do). KEEP HOLDING. It takes at least 30 seconds after plugging in before it resets.

2. Use Airport Admin utility to configure the Airport Extreme Base Station, not the Airport Express! This is the counterintuitive part: AirPort Extreme and Express: Using WDS to create a network from multiple base stations.

Here's the catch. My AEBS recognized the ethernet ID of the Airport Express and "assumed" it was already configured -- so it wouldn't run the auto-configuration (don't try to do this manually, it's ugly). I had to remove the AExp entry from the WDS client list, then add it back in again. That ran the setup routine. Don't forget to set a password on the AExp.

Then I used the Admin tool to configure the AExp to a more recognizable name.

Way too hard.

Update 10/12/06: The good news is that you can save the configuration prior to travel from the admin utility, then reload it on return. The bad news is that if you change the password on a WDS WLAN access point (the main Airport Extreme), you break everything. You need to connect individually with each of the stranded access points using the old password, then remove the password, then add them back in as above. Really, Apple's Airport Express was really only half-baked.

Update 9/5/09

When I bought my 802.11n Time Capsule I didn't think I'd use my Airport Express except as an AirTunes connection. After all, the Time Capsule is supposed to have great range.

Cough. That's great range for 802.11n, but most of my devices are b/g. Also, I was disappointed with the AirTunes behavior of the Airport Express (Aexp) in passive client mode, I wanted to see if returning to WDS would restore the performance it had with my old flying saucer base station.

This time I used AirPort utility 5.4.2, and things were a bit different -- also quirky and buggy. (see also)

It took several tries to get it working. As before you certainly need to do this in automatic mode -- doing it in manual mode never seems to work.

I had to do a factory reset, then walk through automatic setup, and choose the extend network option. I had to work through these bugs:

1. On initial configuration I kept getting asked for an Airport Express password -- even though I'd done a factory reset. I had to disconnect my iMac from the wired LAN (and thus the Time Capsule), so it was purely an Airport client, before this went away. This is pure weird and I can't explain what intuition led me to the workaround.
2. To configure the Aexp you need to switch to it's network. That means you're not on the base station network any more. There's a place where you're supposed to see the name the base station network. When I did this - nothing showed up (tried in two accounts). That is, nothing showed up until I typed in my network name. That produced an error message, but when the screen refreshed the wireless networks appeared.

Pretty buggy stuff!

Update 11/8/09: A reader commented that I ought to try using "profiles" to switch, instead of going through the reset dance. If you change to Manual Setup, the current version of "Airport Utility" allows one to save a configuration to an external file, and to load in a file based configuration (requires your admin password). The files are given the extension .baseconfig.

I've saved two configurations - one for home and one for use with my parents. I've saved them to the laptop I usually travel with and to a thumb drive.

Here's what I did to switch back to WDS on returning home:

1. Plug in Airport Express (AExp). It doesn't need to be connected to the net.
2. Connect to the AExp wireless network so you can talk to it.
3. Open Airport Utility. It took a while for it to find my AExp. Maybe it hadn't finished restarting?
4. Set Airport Utility to Manual setup
5. You can "Open" the external configuration file to view it, but to switch you need to use import.
6. Restart AExp. Worked for me.

Remember that to do this you will also need your admin password. I carry mine in an encrypted iPhone 1Password.app database, but you could also store it in an encrypted Disk Utility sparsefile image on your laptop or thumb drive.

Microsoft OneCare: googletoolbarinstaller.exe is a virus

I've uninstalled NAV and I'm testing Windows Live OneCare antivirus. I had it scan my system, it reported "7 infections". Among the virus bearers were: Gooletoolbarinstaller and GDSSetup.exe. Hmm. Maybe. On the other hand much of the reporting from the scan was gibberish.

More on Microsoft's core subscription software service later ...

iPhoto: what remains when you delete every image?

I'm working on a peculiar iPhoto 6 bug, and one of my experiments meant I deleted every image in a 11.5GB iPhoto Library. I was surprised to find that, with every image deleted, the empty Library was 792MB.

I dissected the remainders until I got the empty Library to 5.8MB. Here's what remained:

Thumb*.data: 125MB - when you delete images iPhoto does not necessarily clean up the thumb caches. These can be safely deleted.

iPod Photo Cache: 580MB - this is what goes on my iPod. It wasn't removed when I deleted all the iPhoto images.

2004: 75MB (41 photos)
and
2005: 2.3MB (1 photo)

I think these are left over folders from when I moved from iPhoto 5 to iPhoto 6. They probably hold images that remained after everything else was relocated. Interestingly iPhoto never produced any error messages about these residual images. I think they were all images I deleted that somehow didn't get removed properly.

Originals: 2 photos only remained in my Originals folder, apparent duplicates two of the images in the 2004 folder.

The final residual: 5.8MB

I'm going to take the 45 images I recovered and compare them to the images in my main Library. I'll provide as an update to this post.

When OS X Disk Utility Fails: Error code -9972

From Apple’s KB:

Disk Utility reports \Underlying

... In rare circumstances, Disk Utility may display the following message when you try to repair a disk:

"The underlying task reported failure"

The Disk Utility log will also display a -9972 error code. This indicates that your disk volume has issues that Disk Utility cannot fix.
What can I do?…

…. For Mac OS X 10.4.6 or earlier: If you have Adobe Photoshop CS2 or Adobe Illustrator CS2 installed, try removing the following files:

* /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Legal.localized/Tie??ng Vie??t.html
* /Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS2/Legal.localized/Tie??ng Vie??t.html ...

Basically this error means you’re probably doomed and should have good backups. Note, however, the curious Adobe related bug. I bet that one’s quite interesting.

Nasty OS X design flaw: Spotlight and sleep

This was taken from a good OS X tech article on why a machine might not stay asleep. One item stood out.

Mac OS X: Why your Mac might not sleep or stay in sleep mode: "Spotlight

... Your computer will not sleep if Spotlight is indexing content, because that requires hard disk access. For example, if you just installed or reinstalled Mac OS X, Spotlight may need a while to index content...

Wow. That's one heck of a design flaw -- more than a mere bug. This may explain all those dead laptop drives from owners who closed their new MacBook, stuck it their bag, and expected it to sleep. If Spotlight was at work in the background, the machine won't sleep.

Dumb.

An exceptional list of Windows developer tools and resources

It’s from a Windows developer (.NET), but a very useful list for those of us who must occasionally dwell in XP.

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Scott Hanselman's 2006 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

He likes the Notepad2 or Notepad++ text editors. I still use TextPad myself — but that’s probably from inertia.

Dans Data on affordable NAS solutions

Now that NetGear has added spindown, Dan likes them:

Inching toward the NAS of our dreams

When Netgear's SC101 Storage Central box first came out, I was hopeful. It accepts one or two PATA drives, does not come with them pre-installed, can run them as individuals or in mirrored mode, even allows volume spanning across multiple units, has easy setup, and, as I write this, it costs less than $AU200 delivered (rather less, in the States).

But then I cursed Netgear unto the seventh generation, for lo, the box did not spin down its drives.

But then, behold, there came BIOS updates, and one of them added spindown. Glory be.

Alas, it's PC only.