Austin Web Designer - Adam Freetly

Since buying a laptop, I've had a vague uneasiness about my recently departed RAID 5 setup. My old desktop is now my development server, and I have a portable hard drive I've been using to store all the music that was once on my desktop. It also serves as my backup drive (unlike OSX, windows has had backup software since NT 4). Unfortunately, needing to plug the thing into an outlet as well as my laptop makes the thing only marginally more convenient than the walletfull of CD's it replaces.

After apple's announcement of their "Time Capsules", I realized an Airport Extreme would make my portable drive as convenient as it should be, and allow the wifest and I to easily share music. Sharing music was easier when my desktop was always on, and had a dedicated IP address. Since getting the laptop, our last.fm compatibility has fallen from "Super" to merely "Very High". (The wifest blames this more on "Metal Mondays" than on sharing configurations).

After our netgear router needed to be rebooted for the bazillionth time¹ , I took my birthday money to Microcenter and bought an Airport Extreme.

Unfortunately, like all apple products, they're designed to look pretty, but the minimalist interface often leaves important functionality out.

Why the picture of the device needs to be so big, I'll never know. The first half dozen times I tried to set the thing up, it returned a typically (for apple) vague response to the effect of "The airport extreme could not be set up". No amount of digging turned up the right answer, (rebooting the cable modem), but previous experience reminded me that my modem is sometimes stingy with an IP address. Turns out setup was running just fine, the router just couldn't access the internet. This is not a terribly complex error, nor one that would frighten most people. Nonetheless, apple has decided that it is too complex for the general public, and will not be shown to them.

After getting the router set up, I connected the printer just fine, which was another reason for getting the airport. Connecting the portable hard drive was another matter. The airport utility came up with another vague error: "Disk needs to be repaired." After seeing my boss lose a terrabyte of music after plugin his FAT32 portable drive into a mac after years connected to a PC, my heart lept into my throat. Then I remembered that Vista would only let me format the drive NTFS. I googled a bit, and it turns out the error actually means "you can't have multiple partitions, NTFS, or weird block sizes on your hard drive" That's not just vague, it's misleading.

So, I took the drive to visit my other backup drive, the one still in my desktop dev server. I backed up all the stuff on it, reformatted the drive as HFS+ with journaling, and put all the stuff back on it. I brought the drive home, hooked it up, and it worked great. after playing some music, I went to run my backup, now a month overdue (I'm still chronicly lazy), and vista told me that the network drive didn't support RPC's. Why this is a requirement for holding my backups, I don't know.

Microsoft and Apple both annoy me. At least with windows I know precisely why I'm annoyed. the error about RPC was confusing at first, but unique, and looked like it made sense to the person who wrote it. At least I can use my dev server to host my backups.

1. Owing to poor heat sink design, as near as I can tell. Netgear's Pro equipment is great, but that seems to be related to the metal boxes and integrated fans. The consumer stuff always craps out after long periods of use (back ↩)