More Time

In my previous post, I talked about my Time Capsule from Apple, and the problems with network connectivity that started cropping up with it over a month or so of using it. As I mentioned, the genius bar guys reset it to factory settings, and then couldn’t see any issue with it. This made me wonder. Was it just a factor of time, or some setting or combination of settings I was using that was causing me problems? Granted, there should not be any setting options that would be able to create this problem, but it was time to forget about what should be and start worrying about what is.

Anyone who’s owned an Airport Extreme should recognize the view of the Time Capsule configuration as seen through the Airport Utility. I’m not sure what the differences are, as the Time Capsule is my first apple airport base station product. Airport Utility is in the Applications/Utilities directory. In order to connect to and configure the Time Capsule, you need the latest version, 5.3.1.

Many of the items in the list above are links to the config pages for that item. For example, you can click on “Wireless Security” to get to the wireless security configuration options. Clicking on “wireless clients” takes you to a pane where you can view connected wireless clients and also DHCP clients as well.

As I pondered my situation and skimmed the Apple support discussions on their web site, I started thinking about what I was doing. First off, I was giving my Time Capsule long names for the TC itself and for the network and the internal drive. I changed the name to be one word with no spaces. Secondly, I was running in mixed mode with both n and g devices connecting. I decided to take the mini off the wireless network and set the TC to run in n mode only. And finally, I was running with MAC filtering on, so I decided to not do that anymore, at least for now.

My reasoning was based on the fact that, after a reset, I seemed to be able to run along just fine with factory defaults. It appeared that it was only after setting it up the way I described above that I started having issues again. So I thought I’d try as close as possible to the defaults, while still having my own TC name, network name, drives attached, WPA2 enabled, etc.

I set up the Time Capsule disks the same as before, each has a short name with no spaces, and turned on Disk File Sharing with password required and no guest access.

By making these changes, I went from my extremely degraded situation of not being able to keep any of the macs, even the hardwired ones, networked for more than 20 - 30 minutes, to now several days of having no issues. The two MBP’s are on the wireless network. The Mac Pro is connected via ethernet, and both it and my MBP are doing time machine backups. The one caveat is that my wife’s MBP is not doing backups again yet - I need to hook her machine up via ethernet overnight and let it do its initial backup. That would take a day over wireless.

My theory right now is that having mixed mode slows down the network traffic enough that the wireless backups kill things and throw the TC into some whacked out state. Granted, this should NOT be happening, but it seems likely. What I’m not sure of is what will happen once both MBP’s are on the network doing wireless backups at the same time again.

Time will tell.

A History of Time

Anyone who follows Apple products probably noticed when Apple announced the Time Capsule earlier this year. I sure did. I was one of the ones who pre-ordered the terabyte version and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. I figured it would change the way we used our computers in the home, and free us from having to connect to an external drive to perform backups. As it was, I was leaving my Macbook Pro on 24 x 7 and connected to my external display, keyboard and mouse, and external drives.

The Time Capsule arrived, and all was well. I hooked up our printer and a couple external drives via the USB port. I set it up for mixed mode wireless, as the Core Duo Mac mini is g. I enabled MAC address filtering, set up the internal drive to be my Time Machine backup drive on my MBP (the mini’s still running Tiger), and life seemed good. I did notice that occasionally I’d get notices about a server disconnection, even though I seemed to be connected to the Time Capsule and the drives attached to it.

When the Penryn Macbook Pros were released (the current rev), I bought one of those and my wife happily moved from the Mac mini to my previous Macbook Pro. Now we were both using the Time Capsule for wireless time machine backups and to connect to the network drives hanging off of it. The Mac mini was still set up to connect wirelessly as well, for network and internet connectivity, but not for time machine since it’s still running Tiger.

At some point the disconnection messages started getting more frequent. At the same time, sometimes the wireless indicator in the menu bar would keep changing as though it was losing then regaining connection to the Time Capsule repeatedly, but we seemed to still be on the network and able to get on the internet with no issue.

Eventually it got to the point where everything would look normal on the Time Capsule, but our computers would lose wireless connectivity. We could not reach anything internal or external. Our airport adapters in our MBPs were simply not connecting to the Time Capsule anymore. The Mac Pro, connected to the Time Capsule via ethernet cable, was unaffected. At first. Then it degraded to where it would not see the network or the internet either. Around this time, it got to where I couldn’t keep the computers connected for more than 20 minutes at a time, and then it would take everything from rebooting the Time Capsule to resetting it to factory default settings to get it working again. Clearly, not what I anticipated when I paid for this device. A trip to the genius bar was in order.

If you haven’t been to the genius bar, I suspect (based on one trip) that your mileage may vary depending on what the issue you’re having is, who you deal with, and many other factors too numerous to mention and impossible to stick into any equation for success or failure. But I knew one thing, resetting the Time Capsule to factory settings was a recipe for at least 20 minutes of apparently normal behavior by the Time Capsule. And sure enough, in the course of things, a reset was done. They couldn’t connect to the Time Capsule to configure it or look at it with their Mac even with the password, because I’d enabled MAC address filtering. More on that later. But the end result was that I was told they couldn’t see a problem (it’d just been reset to factory settings, and was appearing normal) and I needed to take it home, and good luck. They set me up with some basic settings, and told me not to change them, and let them know if it crapped out again. Great. Thanks, guys. I’d offered to let them keep the bloody thing for as long as they needed, for troubleshooting, but they don’t do that kind of thing. If they can’t see your problem then and there, tough. Sigh… It was annoying enough when they started asking about interference from phones, etc… I’ve lived in this house 8 years and this is the first router that’s ever done this, and besides, that stuff wouldn’t affect the Mac Pro on ethernet connection, right? “Oh, yeah…”

I had a strong suspicion that things would fall apart again when I got the device home, and I was right. I’ll continue my saga in the next post, because I want to write about my steps in trying to troubleshoot and fix this problem myself.

Same As It Ever Was

That’s what people want, and understand - same as it ever was. They don’t grasp changes or see reasons behind stats that don’t fit their predetermined views. I’m no exception, in a lot of cases. Obviously, individual people don’t have this problem in ALL cases. But as a rule, the majority of people exhibit this tendency often.

Two great cases in point: the claims that the ipod market is shriveling up and dying, and the amazement that Apple didn’t announce a blue-ray product at Macworld.

The iPod is falling. Well, sure. Finally iPod sales slowed to the point where there was less year to year growth in iPod sales than ever. This was alarming to a lot of analysts who predict the iPod market is saturated, and that from now on, there will be negative growth for iPod sales. See the Cult of Mac blog for an example of such a viewpoint.

The problem with this theory is that everyone’s forgetting that the iPhone is an exceptional iPod in addition to a phone, and Apple’s selling a lot of those. So, you could argue that iPod sales aren’t down quite as much as they appear to be. Just that some of the iPhone buyers were in the market for both a new phone AND a new iPod.

Where’s my shiny disc? Ok, a LOT of Mac pundits are confused over this one. No blue-ray product? But then they turn around and praise the improvements to Apple TV, the fact Apple now has movie rentals, and state they wish Apple would release the TV programs as rentals as well. What’s the common denominator with all of those products and all of the music selling in iTunes now? Ummm… That’s right. No disc. Of any kind. You think Apple’s in favor of ANY kind of shiny physical media now? I say they are going to try to kill it off the same way they looked at the floppy drive a number of years ago and said “Why? Get that ancient crap out of our computers!” And frankly, I’m all in favor of it.

Send the shiny objects off to meet bigfoot and elvis, just please rid us of stupid format wars. It’s a carrying device, people. And you’re worried about the format. Blech.

Let me, or Don’t

A lot has been written and spoken about the Leopard Firewall and the differences between it and the Tiger Firewall. For one thing, the new firewall appears to ignore the long used freebsd based ipfw firewall and instead someone at apple decided they should roll their own. Please note that ipfw is still included in Leopard, it just isn’t used by default, and the system preference panes relating to the firewall are for the new one, not ipfw.

The main differences the computer user will notice are that the firewall’s been moved from the sharing preference pane as it is in Tiger, to the security preference pane in Leopard, and that the firewall uses a different model for configuring what gets through and what doesn’t. This is all dandy, and you may wonder why I’m bringing it up now. Well, it’s because the 10.5.1 update patch slightly changed the verbiage in the firewall preference pane, which I thought I’d point out.

Also be aware that when upgrading from Tiger to Leopard, regardless of what firewall settings you had by default, the firewall appears to be disabled in Leopard by default.

In Tiger, the Firewall was located in the sharing preference pane, and worked by allowing you to select services or ports to open or close, based on the services you wanted to run on your mac.

In addition, the services section of the sharing preference pane would also have an effect on the firewall, such as when enabling remote desktop, which would also then enable this service for the firewall.

In Leopard, click on the security preference pane instead of the sharing pane to get to the firewall.

Clicking on the firewall section of the security pref pane shows that the new firewall is configured differently: Allow all incoming connections, Allow only essential services (in 10.5.0, this was “Block all incoming connections,” which was misleading), and Set access for specific services and applications.

Choosing the last option means that you’ll set, app by app, allow or block status for things you specifically want to let through or to block.

Finally, the firewall also allows logging and stealth mode (where the firewall won’t let the mac respond to pings, etc).

The main problems with the new Leopard firewall are well detailed but the main ones were the fact it was disabled by default, the fact that even with it set to use only essential services, some things are not blocked which you won’t really be able to change, and then the fact that the firewall would code sign apps when you listed them even if they weren’t code signed previously. This breaks apps that change their signature as they run, which meant that some people found skype broken as a result of this.

I think the jury is still out on whether or not the firewall is a huge mistake or will be just fine once apple tweaks it a little. it’s just important for the person moving from Tiger to Leopard to know that it is different, and what those differences mean.

I personally prefer the services based approach of the Tiger firewall to the app based approach of the Leopard firewall, and it also appears that ipfw as implemented in Tiger had a lot fewer rough edges than the new firewall does.

More on Leopard Firewall:
Tidbits article
securosis.com article
Apple’s article on the 10.5.1 update

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Mother of Pearl - MacBook Pro + Nvidia = the Suck

So… it turns out the MBP with the nvidia 8600M GT has serious driver issues that cause horrid performance in 3d apps like WoW and basically any 3d intensive application. Worse, the memory usage skyrockets until the system locks up solid. The only recovery is to power it off and on again.

This sucks.. I have a $2800 paperweight that’s useless for any 3d apps - Apple’s selling a web surfing, email checking “pro” level laptop.

UPDATE: Back it went. Saved me all that money anyhoo!

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Innie or Outie?

There have been a few articles panicking about Leopard’s firewall changes, but here’s a good one on TidBits that takes a thoughtful and detailed approach to analyzing the health of the Leopard firewall:

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9294

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed by some of the changes to the firewall myself.

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Time Machine and You - What Hard Drives Can I Back Up?

One of the huge amazing features of Leopard that people won’t shut up about is Time Machine. And, ok, it is really cool, and hopefully it will get people backing up their systems who never have before.

On episode 98 of the Macworld Podcast, one of the guests/hosts made the comment that Time Machine would not back up their external hard drives along with the internal one.

It will, you just have to set some preferences. I found that on my system, Time Machine put all my external drives in a list of disks NOT to back up.

Here’s how to change that. Open system Preferences.

Click on the Time Machine Icon to get the Time Machine Preferences.

Click the Options button. You’ll see a list of drives NOT to back up. Highlight the drive(s) you DO want to back up, and click the minus sign at the bottom of the list. Woohoo!

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Search Your Menus (Leopard)

I heard a great tip on the Mac Geek Gab Podcast ep #125 about one of the new spotlight changes in Leopard.

The Help menu now includes a search bar at the top, and it looks like a little spotlight search bar.

Start typing something into this that matches an entry on the menu bar menus, and see what happens:

Highlight the result for the menu entry, and check it out… it points out WHERE in the menu bar menus this can be found.

Pretty cool.. a minor but interesting leopard feature that helps you find what you are looking for.

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