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.