mos6507's Blog - Apple Airport Express

[RSS Bot]

For some reason my Linksys Wireless-G router stopped working a while back. I originally thought it was my ISP but when I connected straight through to the DSL modem everything worked. I fiddled with it, put on newer firmware, but could not get domains to resolve. Since I had gotten my daughter a Mac Mini, I read about the Airport Express upgrade to gig ethernet. I got a lot of mileage out of my Linksys and it looked like the AE would be pretty futureproof, which is a big deal with me. I don't like going through upgrade cycles. The AE has gig-e all around including the WAN port so I'd be hard pressed to think of a day when it won't feel fast enough. That plus the draft-n wifi. The mini has wifi built in but I don't think I'll connect it that way. I think wifi for desktops is kind of dumb.

 

The router setup was painless. It doesn't use a web frontend the way the linksys does. There are dedicated windows and mac control apps. I was worried about VPN support on the AE. People were complaining about it. But by whatever miracle, the Microsoft VPN and Sonicwall GlobalVPN clients worked without any port forwarding. I set up my HP printer successfully through ethernet without any difficulties. The Mini seems to print to it a lot faster than Windows. The router and the printer both identify themselves on the network via Bonjour. Bonjour is almost like having a USB plug and play experience via ethernet. I love it.

 

The AE also has a USB port where you can plug in a removable hd and thus use the combination as a fileserver. I'm considering doing that depending on what I wind up doing with my PC. The logical place for my media collection is in a shared media server.

 

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=3826