Comments on: Airport Base Station fix: revert your firmware

By: Daniel John

Daniel John — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:55:26 +0000

Hello, I have recently purchased an Airport Express (n) off of ebay and now find that it only has firmware version 6.3 and I need the newest version(s). I cannot find ANY way to download the new firmware, all the links on the apple site do not work and point to the same page, the way of checking for updates just says there are no updates and if I go to change the firmware like in your picture 2 I only have older versions. I cannot find ANY mirrors of any new firmware. How do I get it? Can anyone help me? The airport express is pretty useless without it, guess the person who sold it me had it in a box for a while….

By: max pizano

max pizano — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:08:57 +0000

my new airport extreme (n) works only once in a while. iphones work flawlessly with linksys router at office and friends houses, but at home, the apple router is a clunker. i must continually re-enter password and half the time iphones will say “unable to join network”, no further explaination! What do I do? Buy a cheapy linksys that works?

By: Notre

Notre — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:20:10 +0000

I’m afraid to say that after more than a week and 1/2 of flawless operation, my problem has recurred. I still have the static IP address assigned and my computer is set to never sleep. I don’t know what changed. Out of desperation, I’m ‘upgrading’ the firmware to 7.4.1.

By: davelawrence8

davelawrence8 — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:04:18 +0000

Nice work, Notre. It sucks you had to do all that work and research to find a solution, but that seems to be the case with these new Airport updates. Apple needs to get on this and fix it…like, yesterday.

By: Notre

Notre — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:51:14 +0000

Just as a follow up, disabling the sleep functionality on my MacBook seemed to resolve the problems with application quiting / system shutdown. I’m once again a happy Mac user!

By: Notre

Notre — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:43:42 +0000

I think I’ve solved my original problem. I still have one problem remaining, and I have an idea on how to solve that one (hopefully).

The original problem was that my connection to the Airport Extreme would timeout or otherwise get lost after a ’short while’. I did downgrade to the earlier firmware, and this did not help with this problem (although it likely had other benefits in general stability).

My connection happened to be working at the time when my wife plugged an ethernet cable into her laptop. Then my connection was lost. I thought that maybe it was an issue with DHCP. In my earlier post, I mentioned that I have two routers (Airport Extreme & another) in my configuration. The other router was handing out dynamic IP addresses. My Airport Extreme was configured to get its IP address dynamically. I reconfigured the Airport Extreme so that its IP address was assigned statically. Bingo! Stability problems have vanished and I’ve yet to have a connection drop after making this change.

The remaining problem is that after doing some disk activity with the AirDisk (I think this is what causes it), when I tried to quit some (unrelated) applications, they won’t always quit. Force quiting doesn’t work either. And when I try to shutdown, it won’t shutdown my computer either; the menu strip disappears but the Dock remains visible and active. The only way I can shutdown the computer is to hold down the power button.

Once I assigned the static IP address to the Airport Extreme, I reformatted some of the partitions in the external harddrive that I was using as AirDisks, making them using HFS+ with journaling. Then I setup the AirDisks to be used as backup sources for Time Machine. (Yeah, I know it’s not supported with Airport Extreme).

My theory is that when the Airport Disks are in use (e.g. for backup) when my MacBook decides to go to sleep, this is causing trouble. So, I’ve changed my energy savings preferences to never sleep. Fingers crossed, this will stop my AirDisks / Time Machine from getting into a confused state and might help my shutdown / app quit problems. I’ll report back in a few days to let others know how it goes.

By: Notre

Notre — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:25:57 +0000

Thanks Dave for the reply. I just checked the Apple support site, in the download section. I couldn’t find a download for Airport Utility 5.1. I could only find 5.3.1, 5.3.2 and 5.4. I’m running Leopard…

By: davelawrence8

davelawrence8 — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:57:07 +0000

Notre, just off the top of my head, it might be the Utility that’s giving you the problems. My solution was a double-edged sword: use the older Utility AND the older firmware. Maybe check Apple’s support site?

By: Notre

Notre — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:00:09 +0000

Alas, reverting to 7.3.1 did not fix my connectivity problems. Everything connects and works for a short while. Once I start accessing my AirDisk, after a short while (maybe 1/2 hour) it stops working. In fact, using the AirPort Utility can’t even find my Airport Extreme base station at this point. The only workaround I’ve found is to unplug the power on the Airport Extreme and plug it back in. Then everything starts working for a short while.

I tried to downgrade my AirPort utility to 5.1, but I couldn’t find it on the net. And, my installation disk comes with a later version, 5.3.2 (that’s from memory; could be wrong).

Anybody have any suggestions???

P.S. The Airport Express is running in bridged mode; it needs to connect to another router, since the other router doubles as an ADSL modem. I’ve turn off wireless on this other router (which only supports Wireless B standard). The other router is set to use DHCP, while the Airport Express does not. Before purchasing an external hard drive and trying to use it as an AirDisk, this setup was working nearly flawlessly for me (maybe had to restart once or twice in 4+ months of operation).

By: Notre

Notre — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 03:07:50 +0000

I just downgraded from 7.4.1 to 7.3.1. I’ve been having no shortage of problems once I connect a USB drive to the AirPort Extreme. I’ve never really had any problems before this. I really hope this downgrade will ‘fix’ the problem for me!