- On the demise of Xserve RAID
- InfoWorld Test Center Preview: Time Capsule wireless remote Time Machine backup
- MacBook Air, a detailed preview
- Time Machine Server, or local external drive?
- How Leopard Time Machine works, and how it doesn't
- A little more detail on MacBook Pro recovery
- MacBook Pro gremlin vanquished, lessons learned
- Firmware update puts AirPort Extreme in temporary coma, full recovery the next day
- BlackBerry tether (mobile Internet gateway) for Macs isn't coming in August, it's already here
- iMacFixit warns: Don't install SuperDrive firmware update 2.1
February 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Once the Xserve RAID storage arrays in Apple's inventory sell out, the product will still be supported, but no longer sold.
It is simply Xserve RAID's time to go. There were several vendors at Macworld Expo showing quieter, cooler, cheaper and more compact alternatives. Apple can't build Xserve RAID for as little money as other vendors do, and I don't think there's a revenue justification for Apple to go back to the drawing board to cook up a modernized array.
Xserve RAID's impending demise was predictable when Apple set Xserve and Mac Pro up with (optional) hardware RAID controllers and mixed SAS and SATA removable drives, but kept Xserve RAID stuck at parallel ATA. I should make it clear that PATA, striped across 14 drives with two kick-ass hardware RAID controllers, has the same bandwidth as a Serial ATA (SATA) drive.
Neither SATA nor PATA can stand in for a 15,000 RPM Serially-Attached SCSI drive. Things of beauty, they are, but pricey. Still, a trio of 15K RPM SAS Apple Drive Modules, plus Xserve's $999 hardware RAID controller, will kick Xserve RAID's butt around the block gigabyte for gigabyte for performance, and with battery-backed cache, there's no compromise in safety. I'm not saying that server-local storage is a replacement for an external array, but Apple is taking three drives as far as it's possible to do. Mac Pro has room for four SAS or SATA drives when you add the RAID controller. Performance of hardware RAID SATA drives installed in Xserve is excellent.
Apple has blessed Promise's VTrak E-class arrays to replace Xserve RAID. VTrak arrays are very close in price and features to Xserve RAID, meaning that they're neither lowball priced nor chintzy in features. But do shop around. Promise is a nice brand, but I've worked with Fibre Channel arrays from Dell, HP and Sun. You can play these vendors against each other for price. Apple will always sell VTrak at list price.
Customers who already have Xserve RAID needn't panic. They have at least five years of Apple support, and presumably Apple will continue selling Xserve RAID Apple Drive Modules for some time to come. However, I don't expect to see Xserve RAID drive modules grow in capacity. A raw PATA drive and a small Philips screwdriver is all it takes to swap out an Xserve RAID drive for a larger one.
When you eventually do decommission your Xserve RAID in favor of VTrak or some other solution, don't let those server-validated, long-lived IBM/Hitachi Deskstar drives go to waste. Put them in external USB 2.0 enclosures to use with Airport Extreme or Time Capsule, or clip PATA-to-SATA adapters onto them for use in desktops.
Posted by Tom Yager on February 22, 2008 05:56 PM
January 18, 2008 | Comments: (0)
InfoWorld Test Center Preview: Time Capsule wireless remote Time Machine backup
Take an Airport Extreme 802.11n base station, add a 3.5-inch internal drive and modify the device's firmware to permit the built-in LAN to share a drive as a volume (a device) rather than a folder within the filesystem, and you've got Time Capsule. Apple has also done away with the power brick; Time Capsule's power supply is internal.
The reason for Time Capsule's existence is to compensate for a few unfortunate realities: Time Machine, wonderful as it is, requires desktop USB or FireWire drives. All of these have to be sized appropriately, which is no easy thing, and worse, notebook users have to remember to plug them in often enough to make the backups useful. Xserve is one fix, but it is a dear investment considering how fast one Mac can eat through a hard drive with Time Machine. Time Capsule fixes that. It is expandable via inexpensive external USB drives. You won't get breakneck speed, but if one Time Capsule gets bogged down, set up another. The Time Machine client lets you choose your backup destination.
Time Capsule does not precisely match the protocol used by Time Machine Server on OS X Server Leopard. The effect is the same: A network that includes a Time Machine Server and one or more Time Capsules populates a pull-down list of Time Machine destination volumes.
Time Capsule does allow users the full set of Time Machine abilities of doing point-in-time file system exploration. It also supports Time Machine's ability to perform a migration or restore from a Time Machine image.
Time Capsule's USB port still handles printer sharing. Except for the direct power input, Time Capsule's enclose is identical to that of Airport Extreme 802.11n. Time Capsule's base price is $299 with a 500 GB drive, and $499 with a 1 TB drive. Apple claims that it uses "server grade" drives, which I learned require special care compared to lesser drives. I carried a Hitachi DeskStar drive in an external enclosure and pulled it about two feet onto the ground while operational. It was shock-mounted in it chassis, but the drive was immediately destroyed. Server-grade drives don't park their heads by default. The next time I configure one, I'll see if it's an option.
I also need to test Time Capsule to see what the reasonable maximum number of USB drives is, and where performance starts to hit that part of the curve that says "buy a second one."
Posted by Tom Yager on January 18, 2008 12:30 AM
January 17, 2008 | Comments: (0)
MacBook Air, a detailed preview
The room service menu in my hotel, the San Francisco Marriott Courtyard, is the size and weight of Apple's new commercial notebook, MacBook Air. MacBook Air, Apple's newest, thinnest, lightest, simplest notebook in Apple history weighs three pounds. It's 3/4s of an inch at the display hinge (closed), sloping down aerodynamically to a much narrower snout. You have to hold it and tumble MacBook Air to experience what a three pound, aerodynamically inspired notebook feels like, because it'll be a first for you. You have to imagine carrying MacBook Air everywhere in a slipcase, being able to whip it out, open it and have it ready for note taking, research, order entry, voice recording, podcasting, writing or what-have-you faster than you can jot your first word with that legal pad and pen in your bag.
Apple got MacBook Air so skinny and light by removing everything that the majority of mainstream commercial users don't use when they're not in the office or at home. There is no wired Ethernet and no FireWire. MacBook Air has just physical I/O ports: USB 2, audio output and micro-DVI (the latter for connecting to a digital, VGA or video monitor). These are all mounted on a tiny panel that flips down from the bottom of the notebook. When the I/O panel is closed, MacBook Air is nothing but smooth, sloped aluminum skin all the way around. There are no lumps or access covers to tip you off to component placement.
Many questions remain that require a full review to answer. My encounter was with a prototype, so I didn't get a chance to experience heat or fan noise. The charger is 45 watts, and the clocked-down chips in smaller packaging is encouraging. I also didn't get to see how far back the display tilts. I did find that the microphone is no to the right of the iSight window, though I don't know if the sound quality is improved. Likewise, I did not audition the speakers. A test left to run is to use this machine with Bluetooth stereo headphones. This works on MacBook Pro, but it's buggy. Does MacBook Air fix it?
MacBook Air's battery is sealed inside. It offers no external indication of its charge state. Apple's battery replacement program for MacBook Air is to drop it at any authorized facility, get it replaced, and get your machine back having been charged for the cost of the battery alone. I wouldn't expect this swap to happen while you wait, and I don't know whether Apple will commit to returning your data intact.
The thin lid encasing the 13.3-inch glossy display is astonishingly rigid. With so little distance between the top of the lid and the surface of the display, I felt sure that it would fail my warp test. I pressed hard on the back of the prototype MacBook Air's lid. It did not flex, and the display's image did not distort. It's my feeling that the shape of MacBook Air's case will make it a tougher travel partner than the typical squarish notebook.There isn't anything to cave in.
MacBook Air is gives you only what you need: A keyboard, a 13.3-inch display, 80 GB hard drive, wireless networking and 2 GB of RAM. The 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU (1.8 is an option) is clocked slow by modern standards, but it is cooler and more power efficient than the latest Penryn CPUs. Apple claims that MacBook Air's battery will last five hours, with Wi-Fi. If that's true, then it'll run 90 minutes longer than the much heavier MacBook Pro that I carry. The 45-watt charger makes in-flight and in-car charging cheap and easy.
MacBook Air's keyboard is MacBookish in style with widely space keys, but it is full size and backlit. The prototypes weren't lighting properly, so I can't speak to brightness of the lights or the opacity of the keycaps. The trackpad is massive relative to the size of the notebook. If it worked with a stylus, it'd make a fair tablet. The new trackpad supports a subset of iPhone's multi-touch gestures in bundled Leopard applications. In Safari, for example, you can navigate backward and forward among cached pages by sweeping across the trackpad. To enlarge text in the browser, you make a spreading motion with two fingers. In iPhoto, you can scroll, zoom and even rotate images in the thumbnail view with a single trackpad gesture. The gestural vocabulary will undoubtedly expand, and multi-touch will reach into other Apple software. Apple wasn't ready to address giving third-party developers access to multi-touch.
It goes without saying that this notebook isn't for everyone. MacBook Air's chief drawback is the display. Apple chose a sharp, glossy and bright LED-backlit 13.3-inch LCD panel. It looks marvelous, but it has a vertical resolution of 800 pixels. Pages and applications that are (poorly, lazily) designed to just fill a 1024x768 Windows screen have to be scrolled vertically on a Mac's 800 pixel tall display, while the 900 pixel tall screen of a 15-inch MacBook Pro is a perfect fit. The reason for this is a rant for another time.
Apple's usual thin, slot-loading optical drive would have made the case and the battery too thick, so Apple sells a thin, slot-loading, USB-powered external DVD burner for $99 (beautiful, portable and a bargain for any notebook). MacBook Air also comes with Remote Disc software that allows it to use the DVD drive in any PC or Mac on your LAN. Remote Disc completely bypasses the hassles of fire sharing. The shared disc shows up in Finder as a read-only CD/DVD drive. You cannot use Remote Disc to play DVD movies.
Before pointing to performance as a reason to take MacBook Air off your list, keep in mind that its Core 2 Duo CPU enables OS X Leopard's 64-bitness. With 2 GB of RAM, running Windows, Solaris or Linux as a guest OS under Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion is well within its reach. Given MacBook Air's small hard drive, using Boot Camp to dual-boot between OS X and Windows is impractical. With Intel's integrated graphics, the primary impetus for running Boot Camp--to run games and other graphics intensive Windows apps--isn't a factor for MacBook, MacBook Air or Mac mini.
Making MacBook Air at home everywhere I go would require some additional purchases: A USB to Ethernet adapter to connect to hotels' in-room networks, a DVI to HDMI adapter so that I can use hotels' LCD TVs as eye-friendly monitors, and the external DVD drive, because I get CDs and DVDs, and burn them, everywhere I go. But all of these fit in a sandwich-sized baggie that stays behind in the office or hotel while I fly, attend meetings and sit in conference sessions. I can't strip these things out of a big notebook to lighten it up, and they are among the peripherals that fatten the case and make a large, heavy battery necessary.
You do have to weigh MacBook Air's $1,799 sticker price against the benefits of traveling very, very light. If you run to meetings now with a wheeled bag in your wake because your notebook and charger are too fat and heavy to sling over your shoulder, you need to make a change. If it's such a pain to extricate and pry open your big notebook just to make a note, check an appointment or send an e-mail that you sometimes just don't bother, you definitely need a smaller notebook. If you start shopping with MacBook Air, I'm afraid that touring PC alternatives will prove unfulfilling.
Posted by Tom Yager on January 17, 2008 09:59 PM
December 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Time Machine Server, or local external drive?
One of the services packaged with OS X Server Leopard (there are so many) is Time Machine Server. If you're running a network of Leopard notebooks and desktops, centralized Time Machine backups are easier to administer and secure than doling out a fleet of FireWire and USB drives. However, if you want to carry each client's protection beyond Time Machine's rolling 30 day window--Time Machine will retain weekly backups until it runs out of space--you might have to set aside twice the size of each busy client's internal hard drive to exceed 30 days' worth of coverage. The headroom varies widely by user, but do you want to try to tailor a backup strategy to each machine?
You have to weigh Time Machine Server's physical server (Xserve or Mac Pro) and storage costs--expenses that can't be avoided in any disk-based backup scenario--against savings in administrators' time ("please mount volume xxx") and user data lost to infrequent backups and cumbersome restore procedures.
For me, what sets aside all arguments about cost and flexibility of Time Machine Server is its catalog. Lots of backup utilities maintain catalogs, but Time Machine's catalog is chock full of metadata and is completely maintenance free. Users access Time Machine with a Finder-like interface that conceals the fact that they're even accessing a shared volume. When using Time Machine server, administrators maintain the ability to do point in time restores, or migrations, without the time or effort of taking full volume snapshots.
With regard to the incremental cost of storage as clients are added to the LAN, someone suggested attaching the USB or FireWire drives that would be on users' desks on the server instead. For five clients in a casual setting, sure. You could unmount any machine's backup drive, hand it to the user and tell them to do their own restore. Leopard presents "restore from Time Machine backup" as an option when you boot from the install DVD. For more than a few clients, or where the purpose of Time Machine is more critical than "undelete," I'd rather see a more robust enclosure, even a dumb backplane, than a daisy chain of FireWire drives.
Keep in mind that Time Machine doesn't absolutely require a server or an external physical volume. You can split local drives into multiple volumes, and use one for Time Machine. You end up with a backup volume that's bigger than the primary, but the average user is none the wiser. That takes care of undelete, and more old fashioned methods can be used at the server to cover worst case recovery.
What would I like to see in Time Machine? My one and only desire is to have Time Machine run only when the client is idle. This is really driven home when you try to use Wi-Fi, even 802.11n, to connect to a Time Machine Server. My strong recommendation is to use copper for Time Machine, at least for the volume copy that it makes as a first step. I realize that RJ-45 sockets, and users who sit still long enough to take advantage of them, are rare these days. If you must use Time Machine Server over wireless, or, heaven forbid, broadband, remember that I warned you against it.
Posted by Tom Yager on December 16, 2007 08:01 AM
December 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
How Leopard Time Machine works, and how it doesn't
For Time Machine's primary target audience, home users, backups of desktops and notebooks running OS X Leopard are fully automated, just as advertised. All that's needed is an external hard drive that's at least as large as the system's internal drive. Pull up the Time Machine pane in System Preferences, select your external backup drive, and flip the big switch from OFF to ON.
After making an initial full copy of your system's drive--file by file, not sector by sector--Time Machine scans your system hourly and copies the files changed since the last scan to the external drive. The copy is non-destructive: A file is not overwritten if the archive already has a copy of it. In effect, the old file is renamed before the new copy is written. A catalog tracks the location of every file in the archive, and the time at which file was appended to the archive.
Time machine conserves disk space by folding every 24 hours' worth of hourly backups into one daily backup. It retains 30 days' worth of daily backups. After 30 days, Time Machine starts folding daily backups into weekly backups, which are kept until the backup volume is full.
Apple brilliantly created a Finder-like view into the archive catalog that lets you browse your backup archive's catalog hierarchically and temporally. As Apple puts it, you can see your entire disk as it was at a given point in time. True, but depending on how far back you step to find a lost file (for example), time may rewind in increments of hours, days or weeks.
As Apple presents the Time Machine filesystem view, you can see your system approximately:
As it was at the top of each hour today
As it was each day for the past 30 days, starting yesterday
As it was each week, starting 31 days ago, going back as far as disk space permits
A distraught user might only be interested in the amount of data he may have lost:
If you accidentally deleted a file today, you lose up to an hour's work
If you deleted it between yesterday and 30 days ago, you lose up to a day's work
If you deleted it more than 30 days ago, you can lose up to one week's work, or all of it
There are users even among Apple's targeted consumer population who need to think about their use of Time Machine, or who may be better off not using it at all. Consider the case of a home user who time-shifts television shows via iTunes, BitTorrent or another source. A sensible user deletes episodes he's already watched to conserve disk space, but when Time Machine is active, it may take a month for that deleted episode to vanish from the backup drive. If the backup drive fills before it can archive 30 days' worth of data, Time Machine flags an error and quits.
That scenario plays out for any user or application that creates expanding or volatile files. A 10 GB database can be appended to your Time Machine archive hourly. A lengthy log will be appended in its entirety even if only one line is added between hourly archive runs. Deft management of Time Machine's exclusion list is essential for busy systems.
Time Machine is archiving, not data protection. If your external drive fails, you lose all of your backed up data. Data protection that covers the failure of a storage device calls for a disk array with RAID mirroring or parity striping. If you want to archive and protect your data, which isn't a bad idea if you're a professional Mac user, use a RAID volume as a Time Machine backup device.
Or, as I'll detail in the next entry on the subject, use Xserve as a Time Machine back-end.
Lastly, to get ahead of what will likely be the most frequently asked questions about Time Machine:
Q: I set up a directory for Time Machine on my external drive. Why can't I see it in Time Machine's list of backup destinations?
A: Time Machine can only back up to volumes (formatted partitions) that are dedicated to the purpose. For geeks' sake, if it doesn't have a /dev/disk* entry, Time Machine can't target it.
Q: Why won't Time Machine use my AirPort Extreme base station's USB drive, or other Mac or Windows storage on the network?
A: Windows and Apple file sharing share at the directory level. Even if you share a whole Windows lettered drive or the root directory of a Mac partition, you're sharing a folder, not a volume.
Q: I'm a fearless genius. Isn't there some way to work around these limitations short of hacking the kernel?
A: Learn ZFS, but know that the likelihood of creating unreadable Time Machine archives is enormous despite what appears to be success. I won't help you beyond that.
Posted by Tom Yager on December 4, 2007 10:24 PM
November 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
A little more detail on MacBook Pro recovery
As I related, I have recovered the data from a MacBook Pro that quit working on me a couple of weeks ago, and that I used the ditto command to do it. For the benefit of those more savvy Macheads among my honored readers, I'll offer a few more details on the process and its outcome.
When I discovered that Disk Utility would not create a restorable image of the dead MacBook Pro's internal drive, I fell back to ditto, figuring that to populate the new MacBook Pro with my existing data, I'd have to resort to a cautious, manual transfer to a clean Tiger install of those documents, applications and preferences that I could safely overwrite. I knew that some information that was encoded in binary form would have to be recreated in the application or preference pane that produced it, and that I'd lose the benefit of Migration Assistant's automated upgrade to Leopard.
As it turns out, Migration Assistant transfers files without much concern about the validity of their contents except when data translation is part of the process. When I finished with ditto, I had an OS X Tiger partition that I knew wasn't worth finessing into a bootable state. It might be worthwhile as the source for a Leopard Migration Assistant run. It was, and the result was better than I could have hoped. Most 3rd-party kernel extensions didn't survive the trip, but this gave Migration Assistant no trouble.The sole losses were kernel extensions and license managers and keys.
The lesson here is that a restorable block-by-block partition image need not be your objective in backing up or recovering data. It is okay to write changes to files as they are modified, just as Time Machine does. Time machine can even be outdone by ZFS and overlay mounts.
Whatever you do to back up your data to an external hard drive, don't use USB. Buy enclosures that have USB and FireWire.
Posted by Tom Yager on November 12, 2007 07:44 PM
November 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
MacBook Pro gremlin vanquished, lessons learned
[accidentally posted with messed-up title to my other blog]
Noting gets my Irish up as quickly as when a hunk of technology takes on the characteristics of a stubborn animal, to wit, one more so than I. It's been the better part of a week struggling, with little success, against some cowardly goblin that infested the innards of the MacBook Pro in my possession, and in the course of his exploits managed to shred months of hard work.
My grief did not immobilize me. I dug through a stack of raw hard drives and found an archive that brought me back to late August. I then resolved to crack, rather, gently open the MacBook Pro's chassis to extract the hard drive to see if it was readable elsewhere. I had assembled the notebook's service manual, the requisite tools and the will for the operation, but Apple's replacement MacBook Pro had just arrived. I went to my office to restore the August backup image onto it, and the most wonderful thing happened: It locked up after the chime, precisely as the dead MacBook Pro had done, and in which state MacBook Pro the elder remained.
I call this a wonderful event, but I didn't think so at the time. I yanked the cables out of both sides of the notebook, reached underneath and ejected the battery like a spent magazine. After a minute's rest, I powered up again and found the new MacBook Pro in good health.
The wonderful part is that in a flash of understanding, I realized three things: The MacBook Pros' USB ports were the proximate cause of death, I might be able to get the dead MacBook Pro to boot from a flyweight FireWire drive, and that if it booted, it would be the last time I'd see that machine alive. While there is no defending this as a product of reason, it played out precisely as I had envisioned it. I was able see the internal drive and image most of its contents to an external FireWire drive, then transfer that to the new MacBook Pro.
Apart from reinforcing my long-standing disrespect for the USB implementation in Intel chipsets, the lesson, the yarn of which is too long to spin, left me with two simple bits of advice, one which you may take or leave, and one you're obliged to keep in mind. I recommend that you use FireWire drives. Apple developed it, they're understandably fussy about its implementation, and FireWire is not part of Intel's chipset. If you need to pull data from a damaged hard drive, don't use Disk Utility; it stops at the first error. Use the command-line utility ditto instead, which will plow through any read errors it encounters and copy everything it can, and with HFS+ metadata intact.
The dead MacBook Pro never boot again, and I don't believe it ever will. It is winging its way back to Cupertino, where it will be thoroughly refurbished and given a new life. I wish it well.
Posted by Tom Yager on November 12, 2007 04:26 PM
September 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Firmware update puts AirPort Extreme in temporary coma, full recovery the next day
After a reported successful flash to version 7.2.1 of AirPort Extreme firmware, my AirPort Extreme base station locked at start-up with the status/activity LED solid yellow. It would not respond to AirPort Utility either over the air or via local Ethernet connection, even after several power cycles that allowed up to thirty minutes between attempts.
This is dire. AirPort Extreme isn't just my Wi-Fi router. It's the NAT/DHCP router for wired client nodes on my LAN. When it's down, my lab's clients and one of each of my server's two GigE ports goes dark, along with the personal Macs and (ugh) PCs in my house.
To guard against such catastrophes, I keep a second wireless router (of inferior brand, speed, quality and style) configured to match AirPort Extreme's settings. I moved two RJ-45s, powered up the standby router, pulled the plug on AirPort Extreme, and my NATed LAN segment quickly returned to service. It's a process that even a manager could manage.
I came back to AirPort Extreme the next day. It booted without incident and it's now back in full service. I still don't know what happened. Maybe there's a supercap inside AirPort Extreme that keeps volatile settings alive while the router is powered down so that it boots faster, and it took a day without power to drain that cap. I didn't have the presence of mind to see if it took any longer to boot after it recovered.
The lesson here is that if you think your AirPort Extreme is toast, unplug it for a day before you read its last rites. The other lesson? If you run a critical WLAN, keep a spare Wi-Fi router configured to plug and go.
Posted by Tom Yager on September 9, 2007 11:07 AM
July 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
BlackBerry tether (mobile Internet gateway) for Macs isn't coming in August, it's already here
While I was Googling to track down one of my own stories, I came across this BlackBerryCool.com entry promising that Mac users will soon be able to use their BlackBerry handsets for tethered Internet access.
I've been tethering a MacBook Pro through my T-Mobile BlackBerry 8800 since May; I point to the very well-documented procedure in a prior entry to Enterprise Mac. Follow the instructions, and your Mac will dial your Bluetooth-equipped BlackBerry like a modem and link it to your wireless operator's data network--in T-Mobile's case, that's 128 Kbps EDGE--whenever it needs access to the Internet. Tethering isn't unique to BlackBerry. I've done the same with Symbian (e.g. Nokia, Samsung) handsets, and tethering is baked into Windows Mobile. Whether you can use it, and how much it'll cost you, is really up to your wireless operator. Free tethering is permitted under T-Mobile's BlackBerry Unlimited plan, while AT&T requires the use of a special data plan. I'm not familiar with other carriers' policies.
iPhone does not yet support tethering.
Posted by Tom Yager on July 17, 2007 01:23 PM
July 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
iMacFixit warns: Don't install SuperDrive firmware update 2.1
This note from macfixit.com warns users against installing SuperDrive firmware update 2.1. The site says that "Dozens if not hundreds of users are now reporting that SuperDrive Firmware Update 2.1 killed their optical drives, with the devices no longer reading media, nor accepting or ejecting." It's reporting that drive replacement is the only option. Read the full warning here.
Posted by Tom Yager on July 10, 2007 09:02 AM
March 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Apple Sets Wi-Fi on Fire
AirPort Extreme is no ordinary 300 Mbps 802.11 draft-n base station, network accessible storage server and print server
The Top Line
Apple AirPort Extreme
Apple Inc.
Price: $179
Platforms: Management and disk auto-mount from Windows and Mac clients; gateway/router capabilities accessible to all Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n clients; file and print services available to all platforms that support CIFS (common internet file system) or Apple File Protocol sharing; clients running Apple Bonjour or compatible zero-config software can connect to base station and services without name server access
Executive Summary: At $179, Apple's AirPort Extreme 802.11 draft-n wireless base station is priced like brand X, but Cisco couldn't have done it any better. Apple's claim of 5X performance and 2X coverage relative to 802.11g is no mere boast; it was proven for this review. Apple's new base station is easy to manage from Windows and OS X, and current AirPort Extreme admins will appreciate the rewritten AirPort Utility's expert features like logging and performance charting. If you plug a USB printer and a hard drive into AirPort Extreme's USB port, it will automatically be shared to Windows, Mac and other platforms able to work with these platforms' native network protocols. As for security, you can keep unauthorized clients off your network and limit the periods during which authorized clients can connect. From corporate campuses to LAN parties, AirPort Extreme is a base station that blurs the boundaries between base station and server.
Pros:
Cons:
| Ratings: | |
| Performance | 8.0 |
| Ease of setup | 10.0 |
| Features | 8.0 |
| Standards support | 9.0 |
| Manageability | 7.0 |
| Value | 9.0 |
Final score| 8.7 | |
| Excellent |
Consider this scenario: An ad-hoc workgroup of twenty developers needs a private LAN with strongly-encrypted Wi-Fi access, an Ethernet print server, and secure network-connected storage for the source trees, documentation, project data and home directories they'll sync to their notebooks for off-line use. The group will borrow contractors for the project, but the contractors can only use machines the company issues to them and they'll only be allowed to connect during scheduled working hours. It's your job to set them up. Oh, and the company has wisely allowed group members to use the platform of their choice, so make sure that Windows and Mac users are served equally well.
If you can't identify with an ad-hoc workgroup, then substitute a small business, sales team, branch office, LAN party or what-have-you. Just put yourself in the position of having to pull together the infrastructure, and configure clients and provision the server resources needed to fulfill this tall order in short order. Apple has a solution in mind: AirPort Extreme. This unit is no bigger than a box of chocolates, it has no moving parts and it costs $179. Leave one on the workgroup leader's desk, take an early lunch and return a hero.
AirPort Extreme is a Wi-Fi base station that works as a secure LAN/WAN gateway or bridge, a four-port 10/100 Ethernet router, a network access controller and a file/print server. No, really, this Wi-Fi box does file and print. Jack USB external hard drives and printers into AirPort Extreme's USB port and they pop up on your LAN and WLAN as Windows and Mac volumes and networked printers. Not only that, but any Windows or Mac user can choose to auto-mount the device when it's within range. For all of this, there is zero server administrative overhead because there's no server. AirPort Extreme's file/print isn't as guarded and configurable as Windows 2003 Server. It won't serve all purposes. But think of all of the printers and third-tier storage managed today by cast-off PCs. You can dump them and get Wi-Fi to boot, and if you drop an AirPort Extreme wherever these ratty servers sit now, Apple's base stations will join together, with no wires and no configuration hassles, to extend your WLAN's coverage area.
When do we get to the good part?
Hold onto your hat, friend, because that's just the first course. Apple supplies a rich client management utility with real-time logging and monitoring that operates identically from Windows PCs and Macs, and permits management over wired and wireless connections. That's true and quite cool, but I'm teasing. What everybody wants to read about AirPort Extreme is that it implements the IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi draft standard. Apple claims that AirPort Extreme tests out at five times the top speed of 54 Mbps standards 802.11a and 802.11g, and that it can maintain speeds equal to 54 Mpbs standards' best at twice the distance. Apple is taking care to be conservative with its numbers, which is wise. I tested AirPort Extreme in ugly conditions and found that in places where the previous AirPort Extreme model (the one with the pointy head) couldn't see my MacBook Pro eval notebook at all for impediments structural and human, the new AirPort Extreme bathed me in bandwidth.
You'll have to decide which of these capabilities to get most excited about while I lay out a bit more detail. As for me, I'm grabbed by the whole package, and this is one of those rare circumstances in which the package could readily fetch more than the price asked.
Is there a draft-n here?
If you've heard of 802.11n, the method by which Apple drives AirPort Extreme and 802.11n-compatible clients to stratospheric speeds, it may have been in the context of some controversy. 802.11n is not yet ratified by the IEEE. It has been baked but not served for so long that most Wi-Fi users don't know what they're missing. Apple is not the first network product vendor to leapfrog the IEEE in customers' interest. There are readers who will regard my take as heretical, but I don't care. There are a few countries outside the US, including the United Kingdom, where the 5 GHz spectrum used by 802.11n is regulated in such a way as to preclude the Multi-Input, Multi-Output (MIMO) method used by 802.11n. I'm not in one of those places. I'll take mine now, and they can get theirs when it comes around. Apple ensures that AirPort Extreme does the compliant thing when it's operating in a regulated territory.
I'm not worried about how 802.11n might change between the draft and ratifaction. Big names, including Intel, have jumped on the 802.11n train. This has the earmarks of being a standard that's ratified by the public before the standards body can get itself off the dime.
Mac users get it
Apple is unique in having baked 802.11n directly into nearly all of its client product line: All Core 2 Duo iMac desktops (except for a discounted, education-targeted model), MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and Mac Pros ordered with the AirPort Extreme add-in, have shipped from day one with 802.11n baked in, but locked out in firmware. The CD that comes with AirPort Extreme includes an installable package that will unlock the 802.11n feature in an unlimited number of n-capable Macs, and any unlocked Mac stays n-enabled forever. If you want to use 3rd-party 802.11n base stations with your Mac, Apple sells the "802.11n enabler" for $1.99.
In addition to the majority of the Core 2 Duo Mac client lineup and AirPort Extreme, the Apple TV digital media hub (I call it the "iTunes terminal") shares the same implementation of the draft, and Apple tests for compatibility with other network hardware vendors' 802.11n support. Apple won't say which vendors play along, but there are only a few vendors at the top of the network semiconductor heap.
Here I am
AirPort Extreme supports the 2.4 GHz 802.11b and 802.11g standards as well as 802.11n and its neighbor in the 5 GHz spectrum, 802.11a. While 802.11n-enabled Macs sniff out WLANs in both bands, AirPort Extreme only operates in one or the other. The administrator chooses the band at configuration time and can change it at will. The fact that Macs, like most multi-standard clients, hunt base stations (or access points) across bands is key to AirPort Extreme's wireless manageability. The AirPort Utility app that's on the AirPort Extreme install disc--don't misplace this disc because you can't download any part of it from Apple--uses Apple's Bonjour zero-config, multicast name server networking protocol to announce the base station's presence. You don't have to memorize the device's IP address or add it to your domain's name server, and if you need to flip AirPort Extreme from one band to another, any multi-protocol PC or Mac will do the trick. Apple's Bonjour client for Windows is automatically set up when you install the AirPort Utility.
In similar fashion, AirPort Extreme's attached disks and printers advertise themselves using Bonjour, and this enables one of AirPort Extreme's best features. That all-important install CD includes AirPort Disk Utility. Once installed on a Windows or Mac client, it maintains a list of Bonjour-advertised volumes and allows users to choose to auto-mount them whenever AirPort comes into range. It's quite resilient to dips in network signals, and it doesn't require a trip to Network Neighborhood or Finder to locate and mount the volume.
The administrator uses AirPort Utility to determine which USB disks are shared and sets an authentication policy that requires either the entry of the base station's administrative password (a bad idea) or a user ID/password combination taken from a simple list of users defined in a table stored in AirPort Extreme's non-volatile memory. The base station won't authenticate users for disk and printer shares against Active Directory or LDAP; that's asking a bit much. But users have to make it through wireless security and user/password entry to get at the resources. It's not Fort Knox, but for less sensitive data, and for data like OS X disk images that are already encrypted, it's pretty amazing and the price can't be beat.
Members only
In terms of security, AirPort Extreme's baseline characteristics are common to all late-model base stations: Network address translation, port mapping and encrypted authentication and data. As required by present Wi-Fi standards, AirPort Extreme implements WPA2 (Wi-Fi protected access; IEEE 802.11i) as well as WPA. The base station still offers WEP (wired equivalent privacy) for clients that can't deal with WPA2, but WEP being as secure as a wet paper fence, its use is discouraged.
WEPers aren't the only ones you want to keep outside the castle wall. Apple has implemented an ingenious Bluetooth-style pairing approach to authorizing clients for connection to AirPort Extreme. When activated from AirPort Utility, AirPort Extreme will enter a special mode that identifies a new client for authentication. It can either capture the client MAC address from the very next client connection attempt, or allow a client to use a PIN key to associate. If a client passes this test, the administrator can limit wireless access from a newly-authorized client to 24 hours, enough time to allow access to safe resources while wiring the user into protected ones. Individual authorized clients can also be placed on an ongoing schedule of access restrictions tied to time of day and day of week.
It'll hang with you
The new AirPort Express bears no resemblance to its pointy-headed predecessor (it had the shape of a slightly-melted Hershey’s kiss) in appearance or, far more importantly, capabilities, speed and manageability. The unit’s white polycarbonate case is not a style statement; it’s made to become invisible regardless of its location. There is, however, one flaw in the device's physical design: As ideally suited as it is to business building and meeting space use, there is no way to mount AirPort Extreme to a wall or a post without adhesive. That's no matter for casual use, but if you're deploying fifty of these things, how you hang them without destroying your landlord's walls becomes an issue. There is a cutout for a Kensington lock to help keep an AirPort that's within reach from walking away.
Its hangability aside, AirPort Extreme's suitability to commercial deployments of small to medium scale should be obvious. Its unmatched drop-and-go capability, long throw antenna and low power DC adapter make it perfect for floating mob scenes like LAN gaming parties and neighborhood micro-nets. There is a powerful home market for this device as well. A home with only one or two client machines might seem a waste of AirPort Extreme's extreme capabilities when basic needs seem to be met by a cheaper device. But look at it this way: The disposable, insecure, unconfigurable wireless gateways that cable modem and DSL providers foist on their customers cost $100 to $200, and not one of them is wired for disk and printer sharing. In business or at home, you may change broadband providers and client machines, but AirPort Extreme will be with you until we all agree that 300 Mbps isn't fast enough and that the equivalent of a box of chocolates is too much desk space to set aside for Wi-Fi, file and print. I think AirPort Extreme will tide us over for a while.
Posted by Tom Yager on March 1, 2007 01:36 PM
January 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
There have been more anticipated shows in terms of new products from Apple, but no Macworld Expo to date will rival the splendor of '07. This will be a party, a celebration of Apple's swift transition from PowerPC to Intel and its successful campaign to get platform buy-in from customers, developers and users of other x86 platforms. Apple's client systems will begin their voyage from boutique tech and business couture to a brick-and-mortar merchandising phenomenon and a share stealer. iPod's success is the model for Mac's crossover to the mainstream.
Apple is shamelessly evangelizing the daylights out of Intel Mac to third parties, reaching around the small and loyal base of Mac developers, resellers and peripheral makers to roll out the red carpet for bigger vendors from the PC side of the world. Apple's message to software and hardware players is that a vendor that manages to associate itself with the Mac brand and image scores automatic differentiation: "Good enough for Mac users." That triggers a reflexive cynicism even in me, but Mac buyers traditionally eschew the generic stuff that's merely accidentally Mac-compatible. Also, there's margin in the Mac. Every Mac and everything you plug into it has one price, the list price, and buyers are okay with that. I expect to see repackaging of PC peripherals in Mac silver, with minimal font panel controls and software front-ends that have the Mac GUI style.
I had declared as a certainty that Leopard, the next major release of OS X, will ship at the conference. I'm less sanguine about that now. I haven't been contacted for an executive briefing, which suggests to me that Apple new product announcements at the show will be of the non-bombshell variety. Or perhaps it's my cologne.
Macworld Expo exhibitors will have Vista idling in windows on their booth Macs just to attract attention. But if anyone showed up selling copies of Vista, nobody would buy. Vista on a Mac is like a bear on a unicycle: It's embarrassing, and yet you can't look away. Windows XP on a Mac is more rational, and for those who need it, there are now three ways to teach a Mac to do Windows: VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop and Apple's own Boot Camp. There are latest, greatest versions of all three are in public beta.
To clear your palate of Windows, a prevailing theme in Steve Jobs' keynote and in the exhibition halls will be the clean sweep of Universal Binary (Intel and PowerPC-native) releases of commercial and open source software. Microsoft, one of the last hold-outs, will show up with its Universal port of Office for Mac, which draw applause when it's shown on stage.
My great hope is that Xserve RAID with support for SATA and serially-attached SCSI (SAS) will make its premiere. A 14-bay Xserve RAID would have a maximum capacity of 10.5 terabytes, and Steve loves to put big numbers in his keynote slides. Being able to move drive cartridges between Xserve and Xserve RAID is a capability that Mac server users haven't had since Xserve G4; it'll be nice to be able to buy one stack of drives and divvy them up amongst servers and arrays according to need.
Apple is going to amp up its .Mac service. Users willingly pay $99 per year for the kinds of capabilities that one gets for free with the Yahoo services bundled with AT&T DSL. Apple's secret sauce will be the hooking of .Mac services into rich (non-browser) applications.
I have a feeling that Apple is going to set up deals with broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox) and cable content providers (like ESPN and HBO) to stream quasi-HD on-air and pay per view programming in real-time. Broadcasters want broadband TV, but they're frustrated by the lack of progress on delivery standards and dead set against doing it themselves. Apple's copy protection is trusted, and every Windows PC and Mac in the universe is already equipped as a receiver.
In related news, the 30-inch Cinema Display is going to get a lot smaller. How big will the new Cinema Display be? As big as Apple thinks the market can stand. I don't see anything Mac-worthy hiding among the brandless big screen LCD TVs at Wal-Mart, but panel manufacturers have obviously gone big. I know that NEC is bringing hybrid consumer/desktop monitors to Macworld.
Not every Mac is ready for the big screen; the tiny Mac mini, which would otherwise be the perfect home theater and boardroom presentation component, has a fast dual-core CPU strapped to a two-legged dog of an Intel integrated graphics controller. That might call for a new compact media-savvy Mac.
We'll see a refresh of iLife and iWork, Apple's consumer and business productivity suites, respectively. Within the iWork suite, Apple's Keynote presentation software is tops, but its Pages word processing/page layout software hasn't drawn Keynote's accolades. However, Pages has the potential to rock out as an accessible, affordable WYSIWYG tool for creating business-grade Web content. It could also qualify as Word Lite with the addition of automatic spelling correction.
The image of a Bluetooth iPod is stuck in my head. It's hazy beyond that; will Apple sell wireless headphones? Will iPod sync automatically whenever you wander close to your Mac? Can you use an iPod as a Mac remote control? Who knows, but there's a Bluetooth transceiver in every Intel Mac, and its capabilities are overkill for a wireless keyboard and mouse.
One thing I know for certain is that Macworld Expo's exhibit halls are packed. The show is at San Francisco's sprawling Moscone Convention Center, not the compact Moscone West. My calendar is packed with briefings from third-party vendors, and they're still calling on the Friday before the show. As if on cue, there goes my phone again. We'll talk again.
Posted by Tom Yager on January 5, 2007 02:36 PM
January 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
VMware and Parallels: The Mac virtualization slugfest is on
Parallels Desktop had almost a year of exclusive ownership of the Intel Mac software virtualization space. VMware is bringing an end to Parallels' clear field advantage, and current and prospective Intel Mac users get to reap the rewards of competition.
Just before Christmas, VMware released the free public beta of Fusion, the company's first virtualization solution for Intel Macs. VMware has demonstrated Fusion, although not yet with that name, at previous venues including the 2006 Worldwide Developer Conference. I've gotten two supervised walk-throughs of alpha releases of the software and, with allowances for the shortcomings inherent in the alpha release of anything, I wasn't impressed with either the demos or the potential described to me by VMware's staff. My viewpoint was skewed by the performance and stability of the better-established Parallels Desktop, which is VMware Fusion's head-on competitor. The one thing I found compelling about VMware's Mac virtualization software was OpenGL pass-through. I saw in this the potential for much-improved 3D graphics performance in apps where OpenGL is leveraged directly.
On paper, Fusion enters the Mac market with two substantial advantages over Parallels Desktop. Fusion is able to run 64-bit guest OSes, a feature that, if done right, could remove one of the two major roadblocks to replacing Boot Camp's dual-booting approach to Windows/Linux with far easier virtualization (the other roadblock is video performance). Fusion is also able to run multi-processor virtual machines, meaning that a Fusion guest OS instance will see a multi-processor PC at install time.
VMware Fusion also laid down two new features that Parallels quickly matched in a beta release of its own. Both products provide direct access to USB 2.0 devices, an especially cool feature given that OS X has such a tiny selection of drivers for add-on USB 2.0 devices. Now you'll be able to plug in some high-speed external peripherals. "Some" isn't a quantity I can define yet; I'm working on that as I type. Parallels gets points for stating that it lacks isochronous USB device support, meaning that streaming devices like web cams, video capture and microphones will have to wait. What virtual USB 2.0 support does give us is access to devices that are covered by drivers for Windows, Linux, BSD, or whatever your guest OS happens to be. This doesn't create a magical bridge through which OS X will be able to talk to an unsupported USB device through another OS's driver, or those created for Windows (et al) by third parties. But if the performance is anywhere near native as Parallels claims it is, USB 2.0 support in a Parallels or VMware virtual guest OS is a major win.
VMware and Parallels betas also bring out drag-and-drop support, allowing users to move files between OS X and guest OSes by dragging them from one GUI to the other. This eliminates the need to set up a Windows virtual share just to relocate a few files from, say, NTFS to HFS+. I don't yet know how extensive it is, specifically, whether I'll be able to drag a file from Windows Explorer and drop it in an arbitrary Mac app as an automatically-typed pasteboard object.
Parallels didn't just cut and paste the feature list from VMware Fusion to beef up its beta. See the next post.
Posted by Tom Yager on January 3, 2007 11:44 AM
September 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Update on 64-bit MacBook Pro, octo-core Mac Pro, quad-core Xeon Xserve
I'm at Intel Developer Forum this week, and the first day of IDF always brings an avalanche of new product news. Intel's new processors have set up a thrilling Q4 product blitz for Apple.
Today's announcement of the availability of embedded-grade Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs makes new 64-bit MacBook Pros a slam dunk before the end of the year. They could make Apple's "Octoberfest" (my term) along with Xserve and Xserve RAID. The 32-bit Core Duo MacBook Pro struck me as an early adopter machine when it launched, and there are a lot of PowerBook owners who will wait for 64-bit before taking the x86 plunge. PowerBooks are very popular with developers, and they'll want to code to Leopard and the full 64-bit frameworks rather than code to 32-bit and have their apps run degraded on the 64-bit hardware that will make up the substantial majority of Apple's x86 installed base. I look at iMac as Apple's AC-powered developer desktop (among their other roles), and it's certainly positioned to crush modular PC desktops. For these reasons, I expect iMac to track Intel's roadmap more closely than other models. That raises the question: Will Apple put embedded Core 2 Duo in iMac before MacBook Pro?
I strongly doubt it. Apple's 64-bit refit of iMac is still fresh. The embedded Core 2 Duo would make iMac a winner in power consumption, but after they give iMac's perfect form factor its due, performance will be the competitive criteria on which mainstream press and on-line reviewers will focus to rank iMac among Apple's competitors. No one expects iMac to perform like Power Mac, which raises the next subject.
Intel also announced the delivery of a "content creator and power user" cut of its quad-core Core Microarchitecture CPUs. On September 22, Apple sent out some mid-life marketing on Mac Pro, positioning to it as "your scientific powerhouse." The timing could be coincidental, but coincidences don't come around often. I don't think Mac Pro will go 8-core with Intel's early adopter quad-core CPU. Intel's mainstream quad-core is still on track for Q1 '07, positioning an eight-core Mac Pro as a headliner at MacWorld.
It would make sense to me to hold back MacBook Pro for January as well, except for the fact that kicking MacBook Pro up to Core 2 Duo now would shake loose the pent-up demand and give Apple a nice calendar Q4 unit and revenue boost, which is the whole point of Octoberfest. Pairing eight core Mac Pro with Leopard for a Q1 ship--January availability would be a terrific bomb for Steve to drop at the keynote--would make a good anchor for the show.
What about octo-core Xserve? That will be the real test of Apple's faithfulness to the Intel roadmap. I should get a look at Xserve on Thursday, and there'll be hints in the design pointing to the platform's flexibility with regard to rapid uptake of new Intel technology. I think Apple might feel out the market for a while after x86 Xserve ships to see if really has to play "us, too" with the rest of the Intel OEM crowd on Intel roadmap lockstep. Intel has Apple all to itself, but all other Intel OEMs have set up design (those few OEMs that do their own design) and manufacturing to stick to Intel announcements like a noonday shadow. Did Apple do that, too?
We'll see foreshadowing of Apple's long-term strategy in January. In the meantime, we'll do very nicely with Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, Woodcrest Xeon Xserve and SATA/SAS Xserve RAID.
Posted by Tom Yager on September 26, 2006 01:29 PM
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