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.
