TimePustule

I bought an Apple TimeCapsule for backups sniggers from the usual suspects. The fact is I had perfectly good backups working with an external 500GB LaCie drive but being the glutton for punishment thought I’d give TC a whirl.

So I unpacked it, hooked it up, configured it and then mysteriously, I couldn’t get it to work @ 5Ghz (a/n) which for me is an absolute must as my apartment building seems to have a at least one 2.4Ghz network for every apartment! By work I mean broadcast, be visible, locatable, whatever you want to call it. At 2.4Ghz, there it is. At 5Ghz, where did my TimeCapsule go?

The odd thing is that I made darn sure I had it configured identically to the AirportExtreme it was to replace which ran just dandy @ 5Ghz, even down to the passwords.

Having had it for 3 days with no joy and a couple of other users complaining of the same problem I decided it was time to take it back to the apple store today but before I do so, I thought I’d better erase the hard drive and reset to factory settings. For whatever reason (masochism?) I felt compelled to try giving it one more go, this time changing settings one at a time and restarting the capsule.

It starts off in 2.4Ghz g-mode so the first thing I changed was to have it run at 5Ghz n-mode leaving everything else at the factory default. Restart. There it is. I double check my network configuration (using the network utility). Yup, 5Ghz, 300Mbps. Ok. Change another setting. Restart. Still there.

Next, multicast rate. Chnage that from 6 to 24Mbps. Restart. Fine. Use wide-channels. Fine. Change country from the default New Zealand (go figure!) to Australia. Where did my wireless network go? WTF!?

Whatever changing the country does, it’s not good! At first I thought it might change the channel (which seems hard-wired to 36 by default) but no, it still thinks it’s broadcasting on channel 36. I can still connect to it via ethernet but it won’t show up over WiFi at 5Ghz.

So it’s now running quite happily (somewhere in NewZealand), locked up as tightly as the proverbial duck’s bum, at 5Ghz. I’m honestly still not convinced it’s as reliable as my AirportExtreme though and it seems to be slower than when I backed up to mac mini which, theoretically, should be slower as it had to make more network hops and compete with half-a-dozen CPU and Disk intensive application on it (including recording and playback of TV, movies, music, etc.)

Not happy Jan. How hard can it be to take an AirportExtreme and whack a bloody 1TB hard disk inside it!? Though what can I really expect of a one-dot-oh product from a vendor that seems to be slipping in quality as it’s market share increases.