New Stuff – Airport Extreme

I’ve been wanting one for a while, and the latest firmware allows Time Machine backups to attached disks, so on Monday I bought it from Amazon.

It also has a cool trick of running a DHCP server while being a bridge so I can finally turn off the Gateway/ALR behemoth in the closet. That will decrease my heat load by a few thousand BTUs.

(The Gateway/ALR has been my main server for eight years, and at it’s last upgrade had two gigs of RAM and 250 GB of disk space… about what my notebook has now but with a slower processor.)

The Airport Extreme’s coverage is pretty good. Of course I loose the N and A in the further reaches of Casa de Snark, but the B/G carries on and I don’t do a lot of notebooking in those places anyway. If the grand additions come to pass, I can always get another Airport to cover that end anyway.

Disk access is through the USB, so it’s a little limited on the Gig E side, but you don’t notice it on the wireless. So far I have four disks running on it. They’re all for archive purposes, so speed and multiple access aren’t a requirement. Which is a good thing because USB doesn’t do that well.

So Apple, how about a Firewire 800 on the next rev., OK?