I.D.U.T.C.H.

Apple airport extreme

I just got my brand new Apple airport extreme and wanted to let you guys know how incredibly simple it actually works.

I know i’ve been becoming more and more a Apple fanboy lately. I’ve bought myself an iPhone, a macbook pro (old model since i think they are way cooler then the new unibody’s). Got myself a mac mini as a desktop, an Xserve for my home network and now a airport express as new router.

The sweet thing is, Apple simply thinks better about the design and the functionality then the major hardware and software vendors out there. Now i know that most of you are using windows and that it works good. This is not a windows suck thingie. Hey i’m a windows system engineer for crying out loud.

Apple OSX Server is probably the worst of the lot, simply said it’s a linux with a graphical shell. The DNS is bind, the fileserver is samba, the mailserver is postfix and the pop3 and imap server are courier.  Now you might think, by my earlier comment, that apple created a great and user friendly interface making managing this a walk in the park. Unfortunately apple created a user friendly interface covering only the most basic of settings. If you want any good configuration to be done you’ll need to fire up the console and do it manually. Offcourse the configuration is then much like in linux so to be honest i hardly see the advantage of running OSX server against a linux box. Only real advantage is the quicktime streaming server.

Apple OSX (workstation) is probably the greatest workstation OS ever made, it is easy to use, simple to maintain and usable by new computer and experienced users. Everything can be done by either graphical interfaces or thru the terminal. I’ve never loved working with an operating system like i love working with OSX. Unfortunately i don’t have a macbook at work so i’m stuck with either running windows or linux at the office. And after working with linux and getting stuck with exchange support for the millionth time i decided last week to start using windows 7.

Now the airport extreme

When you open the nicely designed package you find a power supply, some warranty leaflets, some small manuals in different languages, a cdrom and an airport extreme. The cdrom is labeled “run before installing airport device”, so i fire up the cdrom and install the airport software. Then i plug the airport into my UPC router and hook the gigabit ports up to my internal lan. After the device boots both my macbook as my xserve see the airport extreme and immediately fire up the airport software (odd since i never installed the drivers on the xserve). The configuration wizard is really a snap and i have everything up and running in about 10 minutes including hardware and software install. Now another really nice thing, my macbook has an airport wifi card which supports 802.11b/g but not 802.11n. Now the cdrom came with a firmware upgrade that automatically upgrades my airport wifi card to support the 802.11n standard.

once again a very nice job!

btw, i found out that the airport extreme cannot handle a massive amount of sessions so using it behind a computer that is downloading/uploading torrents is not something i would recommend. Also my airport pro crashes when you start a SSTP VPN Session from windows 7 to an internet host.