On 2011-01-06 at 16:42 -0800, Tom Perrine wrote: > Anyone want to share experiences with the Airport Extreme? I'm thinking of > replacing an 8? year old first-gen WRT54. I want to play some ipv6 games, > simplify the home net and get some G and N wireless at home. The Airport > was recommended by someone who is already running v6 at home (tunneled), but > I want to get a wider view on value, reliability, etc.
Requires a Mac client to admin; I had an earlier generation unit back when I had a macbook pro from work, but after I switched to a linux laptop for work (don't ask) I switched to a Linksys. Bought a Macbook for myself last year, switched back to an Apple Airport Extreme, one of the newer ones. Mostly it just works. The lack of ability to easily tcpdump on the outside interface is a pain, the lack of UPnP support might be an issue, depending upon what devices you have at home. Or you might well choose to count that as a positive security feature. If using 6to4 for IPv6 connectivity then it will sporadically decide that there's a problem with the tunnel, turn the status light orange and cause a diagnostic pop-up on my Mac. 6to4 had issues, as did tunnels from both Hurricane Electric and SixXS (different issues each) so I ended up disabling IPv6 on the box, which is irritating. I don't *think* any of the issues were caused by using an AAE, but I haven't done a swap-in replacement with an IPv6-capable WRT box at the times of problems to verify this, so it's just a lack of evidence, not proof. The modern units are simultaneous dual-band; when you compare prices with the competition, a year ago it was very favourable, but the competition has dropped in price. In terms of just working, the AAE is great value. I get decent signal-strength throughout the house. At the more sysadmin-orientated side of things: * Supports a separate guest network, but think that's wifi-only, so I don't think you can set up a DMZ (but I've never tried, so I could be wrong). * Supports remote syslog and SNMP (don't remember which MIBs are present) * Lets you see the connected wifi clients together with dB s/n, which is helpful * If you attach USB storage, it can *NOT* be used as a Time Machine backup disk; supports AFP and CIFS, I think. No NFS. ISTR that, a few years ago with the previous device, I had an external disk attached, HFS+ formatted, shared and it worked with my wife's XP box once I installed third-party FS drivers, but there was some temperamentality there. I'm happy with mine and would only even consider replacing it with a custom setup running open firmware and my choice of OS; no way I'd be happy going back to any other vendor's stock image. Regards, -Phil _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
