So some of my loyal readers, both of you, might know that I have been having trouble getting the Apple Airport Extreme Network working as expected with my MacBook Pro. The problem is that the majority of the time I cannot connect to the networked drives from my MacBook Pro, but the Wife’s iMac can connect no problem. I have called Apple twice and they have had me do stuff ranging from reformatting the drive to looking at the connection method to creating a new user to see if that is the problem. Still no luck.
What is the most frustrating about this issue is that I had a perfectly good networking infrastructure working with the Linksys WRT54G hardware I was using except for the fact that I could not share a drive on the network. The reason I went to the Airport was for N speed and to share the drive on the network. I even travel with the portable version of the hardware the WRT-54GC and have been relatively happy with it. Yes, there are some issues with the DHCP server in it, but hey for the price it is pretty good.
I bought a new Iomega 500MB Apple Formatted hard drive from the Apple Store to make sure that the drive was powered and formatted properly, just in case. No change in the connection success rate, low.
So now I am getting frustrated, after my calls to Apple, they still have no solution. When I do a search using Google restricted to the Apple Site (site:apple.com airport hard drive connect), no solution.
So now I am kicking myself cause I am thinking, for all this hassle, I could have just purchased a network storage device from the get go and saved the money and head banging. Yes, it would not have been N, but at this point in time my machine is connected to the network via a 100BaseT connection which is still faster than N at 54Mbits. I am almost to the point of writing a letter to Apple Corporate explaining the situation and asking them for direct proactive intervention, I figure it happens to me enough at the office.
What cracks me up even more is that one of the new features in Leopard that they have been hyping is that in iChat one can share a desktop. So theoretically they could log in and see the same things I am seeing. So why doesn’t their tech support tema use that tool. I know that I will launch WebEx when I need to help a customer at work.
I suppose that’s an interesting way to think about it. Never thought I’d hear you say this, however, after all your other blogs about Macs!