AirPort Software Updated to v3.4

iumacboy writes "Available now in your Software Update, Apple AirPort Software v3.4, which 'provides improved AirPort wireless networking software, and is recommended for all users with an AirPort Extreme and AirPort enabled computer or an AirPort Extreme base station.' New features include: 'improved antenna output control, enhanced logging from your base station which is compatible with syslog, and performance improvements for WPA security implementations.'" Apple also put up some AirPort Management Tools (a management utility for viewing logs and configurations, and a client monitor) but they quickly disappeared.

Comments

Airport update

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I am just crazy, but ever since I did this update last night, my signal strenth on my Airport extreme card (in my 15in PB) seems to have dropped. I am getting 3/4 bars on an access point that is about 4 feet away

Warning!

[awtbfb]

You may not want to install this one just yet. Airport 3.4 has cut range considerably for some people. It's all over the Apple Discussion boards and Apple news sites.

Re:Warning!

[squiggleslash]

Should you have already downloaded the update, this thread will help.

It lowered my signal

[aclarke]

I seem to get 0-2 bars less of signal strength on average than I did before the update. For instance, now I don't get any signal out on the patio when I easily did before. I'd think this was likely coincidence except others on this MacRumors thread have noticed the same thing.

Re:It lowered my signal

[gumbi west]

Well, you have to admit, that is a security improvement... now people must be closer to your base station to try access it.

Link supplied in body is dead

[tm2b]

The link for Airport Management Tools doesn't work for me - I get Apple's version of 404.

Right now the Airport Management Tools can be downloaded from the Airport Support Page. Look down the right column until you get to the section, Resources.

Re:Link supplied in body is dead

[AvantLegion]

>> The link for Airport Management Tools doesn't work for me - I get Apple's version of 404.

The iGone?

Reportedly killing range and disables MLDonkey

[Fuzzle]

Over at the Ars Mac Achaia, there's a thread about the downsides, they include:

• Airport 3.4 is incompatible with MLdonkey filesharing. If you run MlMac or MlDonkey, the airport will drop the DHCP lease and refuse to renew. Your mac will assign itself a worthless IP.
• PowerPage is reporting that this morning's update is cutting airport range on Extreme clients by up to 60% (!! !!).

Re:Reportedly killing range and disables MLDonkey

[kalidasa]

Is this actually killing the range, or is it screwing up the calibration on the meter? They keep complaining about how many bars they have on the meter, but I haven't seen anyone mention on the board that they aren't able to use it someplace where they used to, or getting lower speeds than they used to.

Re:Reportedly killing range and disables MLDonkey

[MrAndrews]

I can confirm that it does indeed kill your signal in places it used to work. Right now sitting one room away from the base station (where I used to get 3+ bars), I now get one, sometimes two. My connection keeps dropping out and I have to restart to get it back most of the time.

Still, could be worse.

Re:Reportedly killing range and disables MLDonkey

[MoneyT]

Out of curiosity, if you're using extreme do you have "interface Robustness" turned on? It seems to me that that decreases the range considerably.

Re:Reportedly killing range and disables MLDonkey

[MrAndrews]

No, I turned that off when I noticed the same thing (a few months ago). The one potentially-useful comment i've seen is to switch the channel your BS works on from something set to "Automatic". So far I've had about ten minutes online after that switch, compared to about 4 before.

Re:Reportedly killing range and disables MLDonkey

[babbage]

PowerPage [powerpage.org] is reporting that this morning's update is cutting airport range on Extreme clients by up to 60% (!! !!).

So regular 802.11b Airport is unaffected? My old iBook can't use an Airport Extreme card anyway. Do I take it then that older gear is immune to this bug?

Re:Reportedly killing range and disables MLDonkey

[fourfoot]

After installing the update I can no longer see any bars in the meter at a location where I used to see a very weak signal. Strangely, I have not noticed a single disconnection. Before, dropping to zero signal would have meant disconnection. In fact I have been browsing slashdot quite peacefully for the last fifteen minutes on zero bars. It is a little disconcerting to look up and see the icon all greyed out. I hope they fix this soon.

Kills the range

[aclarke]

See my other comment here on this thread. I used to have service out on the balcony and now I don't. It's quite a dramatic difference, really.

Re:Kills the range

[your_mother_sews_soc]

I agree, it kills the range. I updated this morning and spent 30 minutes cycling through all 11 channel selections trying to regain my signal strength. My connection now vanishes 15 feet away on a number of channels where before it didn't. Not bars, but connection.

I wish I could say I should have read this first, but that was 8 hours ago. If my Airport signal weren't borderline in the first place, I wouldn't have applied the "fix". Live and learn.

Range Issues, ignorance is bliss

[dynamo]

I had the same signal strength until I read this comment thread, and I kid you not, I lost 25% strength the moment I finished the page. How could it know? Oh wait, it's back up to full now. No, now it's back to 75%. BEWARE.

Agreed on the range issue

[azav]

My Ti is 10 feet from the Extreme base station and I'm getting 60% on the bars after running the update.

Test early, test often, test on all supported platforms.

Obligitory...

[leinerj]

I installed the update and don't notice a differe
[SIGNAL LOST]

Re:i'm apple users know this already

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Oh, bullshit. Despite all the "/. favors platform X over platform Y" memes, the fact of the matter is that /. remains one of the best places to hear about both the merits and defects of just about any OS and/or hardware platform you can name. There is no pro-Apple conspiracy here.

There are certainly those (I'm one of them) who will happily spend mod points to mod down stupid "M4X0Rz 5uX0rz" trolls, but that's not the same thing. As an iBook user, I'm glad to know that I should hold off on the latest software update. A look at the various signal strength posts, most of which are modded "Informative," will tell you that a lot of other people feel the same way.

Re:Airport Extreme Base Firmware Update

[pudge]

The plain AirPort update gives you the firmware update for the base station. You can upload it from the Airport Admin Utility. Maybe I am odd, but I always run the Admin util after upgrading AirPort, to see if there is a firmware update.

Improved Calibration?

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be that they've actually improved the calibration of the signal monitor. I had a lot of trouble with my PB's AP card with it losing signal (on macstumbler) but failing to notice and thus to reestablish the TCP connection when the signal returned, forcing me to restart AP on my machine. This was part of a bug report I submitted and corresponded with Apple about about a month ago.

It turned out that there was also something wrong with my AP card, as my most annoying problems (silent dropping of connection) went away when I swapped it out for a friend's AP card. Getting a new one from Apple fixed things up nicely for me.

Problems in 802.11g only?

[raga]

Signal strength seems fine for me.
TiBook867 (10.3.3)+802.11b Airport card on
(a) ABS(Snow) at home
(b) Netgear at work
(Both are 802.11b)

Are there any 802.11b folks having a problem?

cheers- raga

Re:i'm apple users know this already

[Anonymous Coward]

No, DAldredge. It's not just your Apple posts that get modded down, it's your posts on every topic. Why? Because more often than not, your commentary demonstrates a lack of even the most tenuous grasp of the facts (e.g. your vaguely racist conception of India's caste system). If only you would get it through your thick skull that the world neither wants nor needs to hear your retarded ramblings, we would all be better off.

More bad Apple quality control

[Nice2Cats]

A quick look at the Apple boards shows that this update is not working -- users should avoid it, Apple should retract it.

Given the fact that Apple -- as the True Believer faction loves to rub in other OS users' faces -- has complete control over the hardware and doesn't have to cover all kinds of variants like Linux or Windows, these things simply should not happen. This is a sign of sloppy testing or bad quality control, just like the famous creaking left handrest on the iBook, the batter cover that is not flush, the vanishing COMMAND-TAB command after using X11, and all the other little things that shouldn't be an issue given the amount of money that we paid for these machines.

Steve, either try harder or open source the bloody drivers. People with three percent market share and products with these price tags can't keep screwing up like this.

Another Report

[theanonymousbrit]

I have a PowerBook G4 and an Airport Extreme base station w/ a Dr. Bott Direct Antenna. Before I installed the update I was getting 3-4 bars of signal just one room away from it. Post-update, I'm getting one to two bars, if I'm lucky (though I've yet to totally lose network connectivity). I haven't tried the tutorial to uninstall the offending software (again, available here), though it looks like it would do the trick. Hopefully Apple will remedy the problem before I'm forced to take such drastic measures, since it's obviously quite a widespread issue.

going back

[papakis]

I am using the airport extreme base station with my powerbook and a ibm laptop with a 'g' card. After the upgrade the ibm laptop was getting low signal!!!! I manually changed the channel from auto to 11 and got some performance imprvemen, not much. Is there a way to go back to 5.3? thanks

Possibly a false negative.

[porkchop_d_clown]

Lots of people are complaining about fewer bars, but nobody seems to have demonstrated worse connectivity. It's quite possible that signal strenght hasn't changed but just that they changed the way they measure signal strength.

Re:Possibly a false negative.

[DAldredge]

There are 3, count them 3 (1, 2, 3) posts made before yours about people not being able to connect after the update in ares they could connect befre the update.

You must be one of the mods that mod bombs every apple post I make.

Quick Summary

[raga]

If you are having problems with the 3.4 update, revert back to 3.3.1. Here's a tutorial on how to do it.

As best as I can determine, a combination of (one or more) of the following causes the problem:
1) Airport Extreme network
2) ABS extreme not updated to 3.4 (only the mac updated to 3.4)
3) Using a network app such as Retrospect/LimeWare/MLdonkey etc.
4) Apple has changed the algorithm to the signal strength display.

It may be a good idea to hold off the upgrade till 3.4.x is released.

Having said that, I should add that I did upgrade without any problems (couldn't wait to play with the new apps :). My setup does not have the issues listed above. YMMV.

The new Airport Client Monitor is cool. It plots the signal and noise strengths, as well as the transmit rate (which I could also see on MenuMeter, but not as a plot over the last 60 seconds.) The Airport Management Utility seems to be a superset of the old Airport Admin Utility and would probably be most useful if you have more than one ABS to handing off roving clients to one another. It can also "see" all Rendezvous enabled devices.

cheers- raga

File Mirror

[theanonymousbrit]

Unfortunately, I didn't keep the original .dmg file, which included (if I recall correctly) a readme file. As there was no specialized installer for the two programs, though (just the ol' drag-and-drop method), I've .dmged the tools again and stuck them up on my site. They are available here. I still want to know why they pulled them in the first place, but oh well, enjoy!

Goodbye, sweet bandwidth, and flocks of /.ers speed thee to thy doom.

Management tools

[Servo]

Those Airport Management Tools are exactly what I have been bitching about wanting ever since I bought my Airport Extreme Base Station. Less expensive WAP's allow you to see whats going on, so you'd think a nice high end piece from Apple would too.

For what it's worth

[bXTr]

After installing the update, my Ti800 rebooted and was fine. I closed the lid until the next day and had no connectivity. I ended up having to hard reset the ABS (dual-ethernet, not Extreme) and upload firmware via the LAN port. ABS settings had to be redone, but I got it back up. Docs for doing the above are here.