Airport Extreme makes for working internets.

My new-ish network setup.

While the Airport Express + Cable Modem beneath the couch setup I put together back in January was working well for a while, within the last two weeks or so it’s started to become especially problematic. Last night I put a call into Comcast because the connection seemed to be dying fairly regularly. And by regularly, I mean many times per day. Eventually yesterday came around and I couldn’t really get it to come back at all.

After I had a case submitted and an appointment scheduled for next Saturday I did a bit more digging and found the actual problem: neither of my Apple Airport Expresses would link any more. I had this problem with one of them a while back, but I’d sort of forgotten about it. Now the other one was refusing to link.

Thinking that it was an autonegotiation problem I flipped it to 100/Full and that fixed the problem for about six hours. After that the PC light on the cable modem once again went out (indicating no link), would no longer light after many reboots / resets of each device. I then brought out my laptop and found that there were no problems linking to there. I tried a few other devices and the cable modem could link with them as well. Then I knew the problem was the Airport Expresses.

Since I don’t currently own a device which has AppleCare they are both out of warranty. With the Somerset Apple Store being closed I had to either pay full price (I normally get Student Discount), wait a week for shipping, or drive out to the Apple Store in 12 Oaks Mall. Fortunately today found me leaving work early to run down to the RenCen to pick some things up, and with me downtown at 2:15pm, I figured it wouldn’t be too far out of the way to swing by Novi on the way home.

While I hit a few slow bits of traffic (I-94 between I-75 and I-96), most of it moved surprisingly well. I-696 was horribly backed up going westbound, but not where I was going.

Anyway, long story short, things are working much better now. The shared hard disk thing is interesting (mounts HFS+ and FAT32, at the very least, but partitions can’t be edited), the built-in switch has allowed me to use my JetDirect, wired network on the G5 (hopefully Mac Pro soon), and provide a link for the workbench. I’ve had no dropped connections at all, and the Airport Expresses are all set up as clients of the main base station (no WPA) to save on bandwidth, and music can stream out as desired.