One of the new Apple Airport Extreme base stations now has a home in my computer closet --I mean literally - it is a closet. It's freeing up space, replacing some very old hardware, giving me a way of wirelessly connecting old devices, providing a Mac OS X computer for the kids, increasing my wireless network range, and centralizing a printer. All for $180.

My previous wireless network was based on an Airport Express operating in bridge mode. The Airport Express had a somewhat limited range, but the Airport Extreme gives a much stronger signal and does better against the 2.4MHz interference and other networks around here. The Airport Express will be pressed into service as a way of networking an older computer that lacks a wireless card, or connecting to the Brother printer if I move it.

A now ancient Linksys router connected the network to the internet via a DSL modem, but that is no longer needed. That also saves a huge power brick.

The largest space saving is in the exit of a G3 iMac DV. That used to be a server, but I don't need one any more. The Brother laser printer has a print server built in, so out goes that function. I no longer host anything from home, so no need for those services. The iMac is now running games. All my shared storage needs are met with a USB drive attached to the Airport Extreme. On the network the partitions look like separate shared disks on a server. Mounting the disks can either be done through the Finder or by a utility that uses Bonjour to automatically mount the disk when it is available. I had hoped that the two partitions on my disk could be configured in such a way that one would be public and one local, but that is not the case: the sharing settings are global. Either all the disks and partitions are available to the internet or none are.

The disk shares the USB port with a printer via a passive 4 port hub. That centralizes my HP color printer.

Set up was easy, but not so obvious in places. Initial configuration with the Airport Utility is straight forward, but you have to know to select Manual set up when you want to change more parameters later. I initially typed in an IP address incorrectly and the base station spotted the error and took me to the page where I could correct it. That was a nice touch.

I did have a hang up that required a reboot. Something happened to the USB disk, and the result was a frozen router. It is also inconvenient that the Airport Extreme must be rebooted to store any parameter change, even if it has nothing to do with communication. So my entire network and file sharing goes down for 20 seconds at a stretch. I am finding that my work PC laptop is much happier with the Airport Extreme than it was with the Linksys router. DHCP actually seems to work now and the weird delays and timeouts have gone.

Tags: Airport, Networking, Server, iMac, Interesting Stuff

My main printer for the past decade or more has been an Apple Laserwriter Select 360. It's slow, heavy, and the paper tray is impossible to pull out, but it works. It talks Localtalk, so I was using an Appletalk bridge (an old ISDN router actually) to connect it to Ethernet. I think I paid about $1200 for the printer when I bought it new.

I actually have two of them. The first started to have printing problems and needed a good cleaning inside the optics to fix. But I found a secondhand one at Weird Stuff for $30 and it worked perfectly, only having ever printed 1200 pages. So I kept the first one for spares and carried on with the new one for another couple of years. Printer cartridges are available, but they are getting pricey, so recently when the toner started to run low I went searching for a replacement.

The result is that I now have a $100 laser printer that is a fraction of the weight, much, much faster, and takes cheap cartridges -- a Brother HL-2070N. It comes with a Mac driver and runs Ethernet or USB and has a print queue built in in case I ever need to talk to it with a PC.
It's not a Postscript printer like the Laserwriter, so the host does the RIPping. But that is OK. The host is much faster than the printer and the network is 100BaseT, so the result is that it beats the pants off the old one. The Mac driver installs and works just fine. The printer can be configured and monitored via a web browser. It isn't any good at printing photos. But again that's fine by me.

Any takers for two unwanted Apple Laserwriter Select 360s?

Tags: Printing, Apple, Brother, Networking, Interesting Stuff

EETimes has another great article that shows in detail why the home market is so important to Apple. Entitled The Top Ten Hang-ups in Home Networking, it catalogs the problems of interoperability, multiple standards, DRM, customer confusion, and leadership void that makes connecting anything to anything difficult or impossible. But the opportunity is huge:

A few data points provide a snapshot of the opportunities. Market watcher iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.) predicts shipments of products with integrated wired home networking will rise by more than a factor of 10 in the next four years, to hit 223.8 million units in 2010. Parks Associates estimates the number of North American homes with networked digital-video recorders more than tripled from 400,000 in 2005 to 1.7 million by the end of 2006.

They state the problem very clearly:

But there are no easy pickings in this gold rush. Engineers face historic levels of complexity building the digital home for several reasons. An unprecedented number of players are competing for a piece of the action. Coordination between these would-be architects is minimal.

and give the consequences:

"The glue that holds all this together is home networking, and it stinks," said Van Baker, a consumer analyst with Gartner Dataquest, in an early 2006 story. "If home networking stays like it is, it will stall at 30 percent penetration," he said.

The home network is wide open for any player that can simplify, market, and deliver. Whoever achieves significant penetration will either drag the other players along, or push them to the side. Clearly iTV is part of this, but I expect there to be more.

Apple will start with the TV, get a toehold, and place themselves in a position to enable other players to do business through them, so creating an ecosystem. Think low-price downloadable games, YouTube videos, iChat, networked security cameras, and things like that. Make it compatible and it will just work on any Apple home system.

Tags: Apple, Apple TV, Networking, Interesting Stuff

EETimes is reporting on the change in focus of the 801.11n wireless networking standard to home video. 802.11n is a high-speed, multi-channel version of the current WiFi standards, 802.11a, b, and g. All the current Macs have the hardware built in: it's just not enabled with drivers yet.

Broadcom Corp. and Atheros Communications Inc. raised eyebrows last January when they offered "draft" silicon for 802.11n, even though by year's end the IEEE working group had yet to finalize this standard. Almost as surprising as the early silicon for 802.11n was the fact that they emphasized consumer, rather than enterprise, applications on their Web sites.

No doubt driven by at least one huge customer knocking at their door: Apple with iTV and other products. Eventually Apple will set the standard protocol for wireless video delivery and then sell iTV to the display makers in an embedded form (how else will they differentiate themselves?). Like the connector on the iPod the wireless "connection" will be the key compatibility item that locks the competition out.

Tags: Video, Networking, Interesting Stuff

First off, your site is quite an excellent resource. Well done and keep up the good work! I have one question, which I'm hoping you know the answer to. I'm trying to move my Vault over to a network drive, but Samba doesn't seem to be able to handle the : characters inside the .appproject packages. Did you ever encounter this problem? If so, how did you get around it? If not, have you any ideas how I would get around this?

If the filing system were NFS+ and the connection AFP (Appletalk) then the answer would be in the article Network Vaults that describes how to create a vault on a server when Aperture refuses to allow it. However the question at hand is how to handle a file server running Samba (SMB/CIFS), and possibly a foreign filing system like NTFS where there are problems with the file names.

The answer is to create a disk image on the server and put the vault inside that. Exposing Aperture to a filing system that cannot handle the Mac path names results in errors like this:

By creating a disk image on the server the server sees a single large binary file and the Mac sees a complete HFS+ filing system.

There are two types of disk image that could be used for this: standard are sparse. A standard disk image (.dmg) has a fixed image file size and a fixed capacity. It behaves just like a regular physical disk. A sparse disk image (.sparseimage) has a fixed capacity, but its image file size varies with the amount of data it is holding. The one catch with sparse disk images is that they don't get any smaller when data is deleted from them. In either case, when the disk is full, you have to create another, bigger one. Both types of disk image can also be encrypted.

I recommend using a sparse disk image. Create one on your server by launching Disk Utility. Make sure nothing on the left pane is selected and then select File > New > Blank Disk Image.

Select sparse disk image from the pop-up and then specify the size. Pick something that is big enough to hold what you will need for the foreseeable future, but not so big that it will cause problems on your server when it is full-sized. Be aware that Aperture requires quite a lot of space held in reserve to be sure that it can write or update a vault.

If you want to encrypt the disk, do so. You can store the key in your keychain if you like. But make sure you don't lose the key or you will lose your data forever:

Navigate to your server and create the image there. Once you have created your disk image you will have a file that looks like this:

Even very large sparse disk images are small to start with. A 100GB sparse disk image is tens of MB in size when empty. To use the disk image, you must mount it. Just double-click it and it will appear on your desktop with your other drives:

Now you can create your vault on that mounted disk image drive:

Giving it a sensible name:

To unmount the volume, control click and select unmount. If you drag to trash, be careful to drag the volume to the trash, not the sparse disk image file to trash.

When your vault becomes too big for your sparse disk image delete it by deleting the sparse image file and emptying the trash. Now create a new bigger image with the same name and create a new vault on it.

Tags: Aperture, Vaults, Networking, Samba, Q&A, Disk Images

By design, vaults are supposed to be stored on Firewire or other local, directly-attached drives. But this does not take into consideration all the people with large, fast servers and NAS systems who want to use those as backups for local library storage.

Here is how to create a vault on a network drive. This article applies only to storing a vault on a server with an HFS+ filing system accessed via Appletalk (AFP), such as another Mac or an XServe. Other situations require a different approach.

First I will attempt to create one and see what goes wrong. I go to the vault pane lower left and add use the action (cog) menu to create a new vault. I can have as many vaults as I like for my library, allowing me to keep drives off site and rotate them if I wish.:

The Add Vault dialog comes up, so I navigate to my server and try to create the vault:

But Aperture does not like what I am trying to do:

So I have to work around the check that is being made. Instead of trying to create the vault on the server I will create it locally and then copy it to the server. First I create a vault on my desktop and it appears in the vault pane:

Then I quit Aperture and copy the vault from the desktop to the server. The vault on the desktop is no longer needed, so I trash it -- but I get an errorr if I try to do that:

It is locked. Vaults are locked as a precaution against accidental deletion. I must unlock it first by selecting the vault on my desktop, hitting command I to get the information window, and then deselecting the Locked checkbox.

Now the vault icon has lost its little lock badge:

And I can drag it to the trash and empty the trash. But I am not quite done yet, because Aperture does not yet know about the vault that is on the server. If I launch Aperture and look at the vault pane:

I see that Aperture cannot locate the vault. To tell Aperture where the vault is located, I select the vault and select Update Vault Path from the action menu:

Now I can navigate to the vault on the server to update the path:

And Aperture is happy and can use it:

Finally I can back up my library to the new vault.

There is a new warning in Aperture 1.5 about backing up managed and referenced masters:

This is a very useful warning if I expected all my masters to be in the library, because it is telling me that not all of them will be backed up to a vault. Finding all referenced masters is easy: I click on the library and bring up the filter dialog. Select File Status from the + menu (and maybe set the rating to Rejected and Better):

And then select Referenced from the File status pop-up:

If I wish, I can save this as a Smart Album for immediate use as well.

Tags: Aperture, Vaults, Networking, Server