Jaguar Brings Back AirPort Software Base Station

EelBait writes "I'm surprised that few people have picked up on this, considering how much noise was made when Software Base Station was unavailable on previous versions of Mac OS X. But, as I was reading through the 'and more' section of the list of new Jaguar features, I came across the AirPort Software Base Station item. You'll need to scroll down to the Networking section. You'll also see things like IPv6, IPsec, PAM, and Active Directory." Bringing back this and USB Printer Sharing are two of the many good things about 10.2.

Comments

IPsec with AirPort

[SiMac]

It would be sort of interesting if Apple added IPsec support to the AirPort base station (or at least the software base station.) It was shown a while ago that WEP was insecure, and IPsec seems like a much better way to secure a network, as long as the speed hit isn't too big. I've wondered why no other hardware vendors (with the exception of Cisco, with LEAP) have tried to make a more secure version of 802.11b...Perhaps Apple could lead the way here?

Re:IPsec with AirPort

[Ster]

Newer Base Stations (or maybe even newer versions of the firmware for all Base Stations) support LEAP. Also, IPSec is part of 10.2. I would imagine that, if it's not already in the GUI, making IPSec work with AirPort would be a matter of configuring some stuff in /etc or NetInfo.

Or not. ;-) I'm just talking off the top of my head here.

-Ster

Re:IPsec with AirPort

[Wesley Felter]

Does IPSec even have clients and servers? I thought it was P2P, but then I don't claim to know anything about it.

Anyway, Apple really could do some work on LEAP authentication. A password in the style of is not quite user-friendly (plus if you mess up on the username, it's a pain to fix it.)

Have you used LEAP with AirPort? I can't even get my AirPort card to see a LEAP-enabled Cisco base station.

Re:IPsec with AirPort

[b1t r0t]

I can't even get my AirPort card to see a LEAP-enabled Cisco base station.

Perhaps they've hidden the SSID? In that case, you'll have to type it in yourself. It may very likely be "typhoon" or "tsunami".

You log into LEAP by typing "<username/password>" into the password field (the angle brackets are important). If your username is part of a domain, you will need to enter "<domain\username/password>" instead. If you get tired of typing this every time, go to the Network control panel and type the SSID/password into the appropriate boxes of the Airport tab for auto-logon.

Re:IPsec with AirPort

[Wesley Felter]

Perhaps they've hidden the SSID? In that case, you'll have to type it in yourself.

I tried typing in the SSID, but I just got an error message.

Re:Sheesh

[PeekabooCaribou]

OS X has been a dependable, full-featured OS since version 10.1. I'll be the first to admit that pre-10.1 was sluggish and not ready for prime-time. It's now fast, has a large base of native applications, and it's becoming increasingly mature with each release (as good software tends to do).

I don't think OS X should be weighed so heavily against OS 9. For every feature that we lost in the transition to X, we gained two improvements.

As for people still stuck with machines that can't run OS X.. I don't know, I can't even imagine taking four or five years between buying new computer hardware.

I wonder..

[Perdo]

If USB Printer shareing works under DHCP this time around? The problem was that the computer that hosted the shared printer had to have a static IP, otherwise the clients would not be able to find it again.

This gave one of the beautifully useless, undocumented "Type 14354" errors.

Re:I wonder..

[PeekabooCaribou]

Apple probably includes this functionality as part of Rendezvous. (Rendezvous allows for networking with "zero-configuration"). Their site only mentions hardware options, where networked computers automatically find Rendezvous-aware printers, but given the nature of the interface I would think they could extend USB Printer Sharing to use it, also.

Re:I wonder..

[seven5]

yes, they do. USB printer sharing is enabled with Rendezvous. There isn't a single thing to set up. In fact when going to print on my iBook, the shared printer was already there. I did absolutely nothing to set it up. Its very convenient, andone of my favorite technologies in 10.2. I'm really looking forward to the different ways devs use this.

Re:Sheesh

[BandwidthHog]

Remember folks, it *does* run on older hardware, and very nicely I might add. I'm on a Umax S-900, a machine that first hit the market six years ago this month. I've got a bunch RAM in it, a big, fast SCSI drive, a dual head Radeon, and a 400mhz G3. Counting the initial purchase price of the machine, I'm still under $500 total.

And flame away, but this thing's as smooth and responsive (in most ways, but not all) as Win98SE on my P3/733 at work.

How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[dpbsmith]

...are actually just OS 9's old features?

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[MalleusEBHC]

It's getting tiring to hear about people saying "OS 9 could do this and OS X can't blah blah blah." This used to be very bad before 10.1 was released, but I do not blame anyone for this as 10.0.x was not truly a complete commercial OS. However, since 10.1 was released, there really has been no competition: for users with machines capable of running X (basically any G3 with decent RAM), OS X is an excellent choice. All major applications (or quality alternatives) now run native, there is no major slowdown as in 10.0.x, and you get to enjoy all the great things that are exlusive to OS X like Aqua and Unix. I used 9 for pretty much it's entire lifespan until X came out and even though I loved it, I'll never go back to an OS where I need to reboot bare minimum once a day and can't multitask. If you want to deal with this in order to use a couple minor features that aren't yet in OS X, go right ahead; it's your loss, not mine.

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[selderrr]

All major applications (or quality alternatives) now run native
Well, I am tired of hearing *that*. Quite a few bigshot applications do not run native at all. Quark is one example, but even if quark gets its act together, the printing office I regularly do freelance stuff for is not going to switch its 70 macs to OSX because a lot of stuff has not been ported properly yet. (their 4D application for instance refuses to work properly under OSX)

Right now, OSX is becoming a stable, usable consumer OS. But for serious work, it still lacks a lot of features.

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[mkoz]

I would make one additional requirement. A supported graphics card. Don't get me wrong I have been running OSX on my Wallstreet powerbook since the public beta. But it has never been able to play movies, and the GUI is sluggish. Anything without a GUI is very snappy indeed, but as a user GUI speed is very important, and as far as I can tell that is all about video card support. I do X because I use the unix, but 9 is much more responsive on that hardware.

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[Valdrax]

All major applications (or quality alternatives) now run native, there is no major slowdown as in 10.0.x, and you get to enjoy all the great things that are exlusive to OS X like Aqua and Unix.

The first two statements are complete BS. Many major software tools have not been ported to Mac OS X -- Max/MSP, Director, QuarkXPress, etc. Much of the software that I use is noticeably slower in Mac OS X 10.1.5 than in Mac OS 9.2.2, including that unworthy abomination that they've passed on the name "Finder" to. About the only GUI apps in Mac OS X that are faster are Java apps and Mozilla. God forbid you want to play any games like Baldur's Gate 2.

As for the last bit, Apple can take Aqua and shove it. I'd rather have a responsive, consistent, and well-designed GUI than the eye-candy lobotomized NeXT crap that Apple pawned off on us with the Aqua "user experience." I used to bleed the Apple rainbow, but with each day I use Mac OS X and each time Apple releases another unimpressive, sluggish system for 150% of what I could pay for a top of the line PC I wonder, "Why do I still bother?"

Using a Macintosh is about the user interface, and today's Apple is killing everything that was once great about the platform.

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[BitGeek]

What more consistent and responsive and well designed gui is there than Aqua? I've never seen one that comes anywhere close in usability, speed, and quality.

And each release gets faster, Jaguar is a hardware upgrade in a box. The UI speed is amazing.

Oh, and the "%150" claim about PC prices-- that's funny. Apparently, you've not priced a PC lately, or you think a 2GHz processor is twice as fast as a 1GHz processor.

It gets tireing hearing all these complaints about apple from people who either don't understand the technology or are just making stuff up. Apple is kicking ass in all the areas you complain about... wtf?

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[Valdrax]

What more consistent and responsive and well designed gui is there than Aqua?

Let's see... How about Mac OS 9? Do you even understand the basic principles of HCI that made Mac OS 9 so great, or are you too caught up in the eye candy to understand? It does not let users take advantage of muscle memory the same way Mac OS 9 did by constantly moving the standard 3 menu items (File, Edit, View) with each application switch. It throws away the advantages of the inifinite depth of the four corners of a desktop that Mac OS 9 allowed users to exploit. It has an inconsistent Finder that randomly resizes list columns as you move around and that refuses to retain spatial organization of files within folders. Don't even get me started on the Dock. There have been many articles highlighting the numerous flaws of that GUI element that anyone who actually bothered to examine in the Beta days should already know about.

And each release gets faster, Jaguar is a hardware upgrade in a box. The UI speed is amazing.

Amazingly underwhelming. I don't know about you, but the responsiveness on my 400 MHz G4 is terrible compared to Mac OS 9. Windows and X11 are snappy and responsive on my friend's old 233 MHz Pentium II. Plus the Mac OS X scheduler is so poorly written that setting the priority on any process down to its worst value will still not improve GUI responsiveness. If the process wants the CPU constantly, it will get it regardless of priority. I simply cannot believe that you actually think the UI speed is "amazing." Moving around and resizing Windows should be instantaneous on a 400 MHz machine!

Oh, and don't buy the marketing hype. "A hardware upgrade in a box" is a tacit way of admitting that Mac OS X is a sluggish, poorly written OS in the first place. You'll find on other OSes that there's not so much room for improvement anymore.

Oh, and the "%150" claim about PC prices-- that's funny. Apparently, you've not priced a PC lately, or you think a 2GHz processor is twice as fast as a 1GHz processor.

Live in denial, man.

With the exception of their SIMD units, Altivec vs. MMX/SSE, the CPI and instruction throughput advantage on PPC chips ain't what it used to be. I remember back in the day when PPCs were clocked the same as Pentiums AND faster per clock. Those days are long past. AMD chips are on par with PPC chips are the same clock speed for the types of processing that a system will spend 95% of its time using (unless you do nothing but run Photoshop filters).

AMD chips are also clocked 50% faster and cost a third to a fourth the price of a G4. Even P4s, which don't perform quite as well at the same clock speed are clocked twice as fast AND cost much less. Have you actually looked into Macintosh CPU upgrades lately? Upgrading my Celeron system to the fastest PIII-FCPGA available would cost me less than $200, with $120 being a good breaking point. Upgrading my G4 would cost me over $1K to get a chip that performs at 70-80% of a mid-range x86 chip.

Don't buy into the whole claim that G4s are just as fast as P4s. The claim only holds up for certain specialized operations that 90% of the software you run doesn't use. For the general case bread-and-butter integer, floating point, and memory manipulation operations, G4s trail the x86 family. Perhaps this wouldn't be the case Apple could actually use smoe modern memory modules instead of getting half the performance out of an underclocked DDR memory system -- which, I might add, is a recent addition to a family of systems whose high-end systems have been languishing under PC133 for the past 2 years while every non-budget x86 system has moved on DDR or RDRAM.

This is old news. The only thing that can save Apple's hardware is if IBM actually markets that Power4-derived chip for Apple desktops and they crank up the memory bandwidth.

It gets tireing hearing all these complaints about apple from people who either don't understand the technology or are just making stuff up. Apple is kicking ass in all the areas you complain about... wtf?

I'm tired of mindless sheep who think marketing drivel is wisdom from the mountain top. I use Macs and PCs side-by-side, day-by-day. My PC at work is a 600 MHz P3 running Win2k that's of the same generation as my 400 MHz G4. Guess which one processes Genome@Home work units faster? Guess which one I can actually run Genome@Home on without killing the performance of my desktop and making simple window operations unusable? Between my rock-bottom $400 dollar Celeron system with built-in Savage4 graphics and my G4 that has a better graphics card and twice the memory, I'd like you to guess which runs Warcraft III faster.

Unlike you, apparently, I've actually used the Mac since the System 6 days, and I've experienced first-hand the loss of productivity and ease of use that came with Mac OS X. Yes, Mac OS X crashes far, far less often. Yes, cooperative multitasking wasn't that great (but it wasn't that much worse than Darwin's kernel's attempt at preemptive multitasking). However, Mac OS 9 had years of usability studies and HCI research behind it that was all thrown out the window for eye candy. There is absolutely NO reason why the GUI paradigm from Mac OS 9 couldn't be kept, but they preferred to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[ZxCv]

But for serious work, it still lacks a lot of features.

Like what? Maybe I've never done serious work before, but in the year or so since I've been using OS X as my primary OS (for work), I haven't found a single thing that I couldn't do (except for watching Real media clips, which was recently rectified). Correcting your statement, I'd go with:

OS X has quite a few features that make it more ideal for serious work than OS 9; however, a few key applications have yet to support OS X, making it an unsuitable OS for some work situations.

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[pi radians]

*cough* troll *cough*

I was just going to assume you were someone running Mac OS X and thought it was slow, until I read some other posts on this subject made by a certain jchristopher...

you have no idea what you are talking about and you just look foolish for pretending.

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[BitGeek]

I've used the mac since pre-system 6. System 4, in fact.

I know CHI well.

You think your opinions and familiarity with Windows and PCs means that you can decide whats "good" and whats "bad" CHI.... and you're wrong.

Just another PC fanatic who is living in denial.

Re:How many of Jaguar's "150 new features..."

[BitGeek]

Unbearably slow?

That's funny. Its certainly sluggish on my 9500, but then, that computer is so old its not even officially supported.

All these people complaining about the speed of OS X are just bashing it-- I doubt any of you have ever even installed it.

Let alone used it on modern hardware. I thought it was zippy before, with jaguar it became instantaneous.

Dragging this full window around (not outline as you get in "speedy OS 9" but full window, with greater than 60Hz updates to the window.)

Yeah, its unbearably slow. Sheesh. I've never seen an operating system that could do that, not windows, not OS 9, not nothing.

Re:Sheesh

[BandwidthHog]

> I have Windows XP running great on
> a 166 Mhz Pentium with 64 MB memory.

Shouldn't that be spelled 'grate'?

Re:That's wonderful.

[norwoodites]

M$ does not have any say into Apple because their shares are nonvoting ones.

Re:Sheesh

[King Babar]

I don't think OS X should be weighed so heavily against OS 9. For every feature that we lost in the transition to X, we gained two improvements.

I agree with you in many ways, but...

Alas, the two things *I* lost going from OS9 to OS X were USB printer sharing and Airport basestation, and correcting those were (potentially) big ticket items. I did go out and buy a WAP to solve the Airport issue (Mac OS9 software base station was always a bit quirky), but the lack of USB printer sharing was pretty annoying unconditionally.

To put it another way, if you want to increase adoption rates for Mac OS X among the SOHO group in particular, a really bad strategy is to break parts of printing and wireless networking. Yes, we survived, but I think the gripes here are legitimate. (Compare with: "I need more RAM to run OS X; wah!" and the like that we did see back in the day.)

Re:That's wonderful.

[jkujawa]

Actually, Microsoft sold their Apple shares quite a while ago.

At a very healthy profit.

More details at Apple.com

[stevenprentice]

http://www.apple.com/airport/swbase/

Apple has a great page set up for this.

Yah, but what about serial ports?

[Mr. Protocol]

Apparently the beta version(s) of OS X had support for serial ports, and it was ripped out.

Getting access to the serial ports, via a USB-to-serial converter, is the sole reason I still boot OS 9. My Newtons need it. My GPS needs it. Just because Steve thinks serial is dead doesn't mean all other devices disappear. The day I can't get at my serial gear, by booting OS 9 or otherwise, is the day I quit upgrading my Apple gear.

Re:Yah, but what about serial ports?

[Draoi]

Apparently the beta version(s) of OS X had support for serial ports, and it was ripped out.

Nonsense! As others have pointed out, the new XServe has a serial port on the back. Also, as any Darwin developer will tell you, IOKit supports serial devices natively from MacOS X.

Just because Steve thinks serial is dead

Steve obviously doesn't.

Here's a thought - there isn't a useful MacOS X-based GPS program available out there to talk to all those Garmin serial-based gadgets out there. I've a GPS II+ which I use all the time, but it pisses me off bigtime that there's nothing for MOSX which will store and sort waypoints & routes. So rather than bitch and moan about it, let's go write one! I can offer MacOS developer skills (CW8/Darwin/*NIX/Carbon) & would be willing to make a start. Anyone else interested??

Re:Yah, but what about serial ports?

[mkoz]

I used GPSy under OS 9 and was really happy. I know that there has been some talk about porting that app to OS X. I would email them and see if you could help port that app. It was very nice.

Jaguar even takes it a step further

[zachlipton]

Not only does jaguar have Software Base Station for AirPort, it has a built-in DHCP server/NAT router for ethernet as well (both are in the sharing preferance pane). Two check boxes are all it takes to share an internet connection over AirPort and a standard wired TCP/IP connection. Isn't the mac great?

Re:Sheesh

[b1t r0t]

Lucky you. My PowerTower Pro (with G3 400) puked after I installed Jaguar on it (using XPostFacto). Puked as in all over the screen, followed by a kernel panic, when it restarted. Fortunately I made a point of not installing it over the working copy of 10.1.5.

Re:Sheesh

[BandwidthHog]

Lucky you. My PowerTower Pro (with G3 400) puked after I installed Jaguar on it (using XPostFacto). Puked as in all over the screen, followed by a kernel panic, when it restarted. Fortunately I made a point of not installing it over the working copy of 10.1.5.

Guess I was unclear. I still haven't done 10.2 yet, as I've outgrown my warez dayz and don't have the cash right now. I was also waiting for others braver than I to figure out the perfect unsupported install.

It seems Ryan Rempel has been cranking out builds faster than Apple was, but I've already seen success stories on most "normal" unsupported machines. (But only with a G3 or G4, not with their original 603 or 604 chips.)

There was something about the PTP recently. I don't remember quite what it was, but the user did eventually get around it. I think it may have had something to do with the NVRAM, but I'm probably wrong.

Sometimes the magic works...

[Mr. Protocol]

...and sometimes it doesn't.

Serial port access under Mac OS X seems quite dicey. An informal poll among Newton types, who either get to use USB-to-serial adapters or Ethernet if they're lucky, shows that access by OS 9 apps running under Classic to serial ports is an on-again, off-again affair. Currently, I have to boot to OS 9 to get access to a serial port.

In practice, it seems that serial port access depends on luck.

Re:That's wonderful.

[MaxVlast]

I applaud your spirit, but comments like this bug me. There are a lot of fans out there, but people seldom put their money where their mouthes are. It's like walking down the beach and seeing someone drowning and saying, "Gosh, I hope you get out okay" and continuing to walk.

Airport Base Station?

[peatbakke]

I have one word for you: Brickhouse. You can do all sorts of crazy firewalling and routing with that program, and there's a particularly easy wizard that'll let you set up a basestation-esque connection. I dig it.