Yep, missed a couple points on the original post. If the Airport Extreme has some issues with file and print sharing in Windows environments then the AirPort won't meet the original posters requirements. I paid a premium not for file and print sharing but for the 'dual band, great range' part. Also the 'routes packets without requiring a reboot on a daily basis' was fairly important to me as well.:)
Nice to know that it works in WINE, nice option for people that are exclusively running Linux. I use Macs primarily for my desktop machines, so for me it has never been an issue.
I have mine in bridge mode as well (behind a FreeBSD gateway) but I've set it up as a full out NAT router for many other people.
I'm sure if I investigated I'd figure out I either had a power outage or updated my config 82 days ago?;)
Having worked in for several large scale WISPs for the last 8 years, I know I'm getting sick of the "My internet is broken" - "Power cycle your damn router" dialogue I hear over and over again on a daily basis. What's the uptime on a Linksys before a reboot is required nowadays, an hour or two?
...but it does have NAT-PMP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_Port_Mapping_Protocol an IETF standard that handles at least the NAT traversal features in a similar fashion. There's nothing else in UPNP that I care about. Although not everything supports NAT-PMP (PS3 for example, last I looked).
Still would be nice to have the option for those that need it, I suppose, but the lack of it has never concerned me in the slightest.
I've never had simular problems, what do you mean by "it takes Windows machines forever log into it" and "setting up printers can be a nighmare, and the Samba shares are hard to keep online," if I'm interpreting that correctly it sounds like you're actually using the disk and print sharing features of this router, or are you implying that Samba connections that just plain pass through it are giving you problems? If the latter, I've never seen such issues. If you're talking about the former, I don't actually use the file and print sharing features on the Airport, it could be complete garbage for all I know.
Then again, I'm the type that wants a router to "route" and a file server to share files. Any printer in 2010 that can't share itself over the network via a built in print server is also not worth my time.
Are you seeing any problems with non-disk and print sharing features?
It's a little bit expensive at ~ $200, but you get what you pay for. It has great features for the price and is rock solid. Dual-band 802.11N, Gigabit Ethernet, IPv6, SNMP, bridging and routing modes, etc, etc. The only drawback is the proprietary GUI required to configure it (no web interface). This is a show stopper it if you do not have a Windows or OS X based computer at your disposal, but few people are in that situation.
The only reason to pass it up is if you're one of those weirdoes that immediately write off anything with an Apple logo.
Beyond a few rare anomalies, every other consumer router I've used in nearly a decade has been complete garbage, I'd sooner build a PC based Linux or BSD gateway over dealing with that nonsense.
I would be all for having a Linux based firmware like coreboot replace our current mess that is the BIOS! Wonder if that could actually gain ground or if it's just a pipe dream though?
Must EFI by necessity bring "trusted computing" with it though? Maybe I need to take a closer look at the specs. Though Apple systems are EFI based, they haven't really used it to lock down the computer in any sort of way. Are you suggesting they simply haven't decided to do that but the capability is ready and waiting, not sure I follow how the two rela to each other. I keep bringing Aplle up in this discussion seeing as how I can't think of any other mainstream vendor that has ditched BIOS and/or adopted EFI.
If a system was completely locked down beyond my personal threshold of tolerance, I simply wouldn't buy said motherboard or system. It should be possible to adopt EFI without implementing the closed systems you fear, no?
This is why I prefer the Litres per 100 KM. It solves the problem this article describes.
Plus 'Gallon' is ambiguous.
ie) In Canada car ads often use imperial galons, but you may also see an American ad that uses US gallons. You have no way of knowing which the ad intended.
Interesting counterpoint - I mean that, not being sarcastic.
Maybe EFI isn't a golden solution, I'm not familiar enough with EFI on a low level to comment. Perhaps I just blindly support it because I just want 'SOMETHING' to replace BIOS. Specifically I like that the Mac platform can be entirely managed from the OS, ie) setting boot device priority, power management etc along side the rest of your OS settings. The whole PC model of having certain settings configured only in BIOS and others via the OS seems rather odd by modern standards. It gets quirkier when there are overlaps in features between BIOS settings and OS settings (power management being the best example).
I'd also like better features on power-up. Specifically, as I still setup a few headless PCs for BSD and Linux servers, it annoys me that serial console is not available until, at a minimum, you reach the bootloader of the OS. All 'settings' in BIOS are completely inaccessible in a headless serial environment as things currently stand.
I also rather enjoy the 'target disk mode' on Macs that will instantly turn your system into an external firewire attached drive on startup. This is extremely handy for recovering files from an unbootable or otherwise corrupt OS without having to physically remove the drive.
Adopting EFI wouldn't necessarily mean we gain such features, but it seems to me EFI would make such features more feasible. I guess in summary, I'm not necessarily pro EFI, but I want to see something far more modern and capable replace the obsolete BIOS we are currently stuck with.
Perhaps eliminating BIOS and adopting EFI isn't even necessary to unify things and address the limitations, I may just be equating the two even if they are not necessarily mutually inclusive.
Regardless, the PC world needs something better than BIOS, I'm not aware of any alternatives to EFI that may better accomodate this.
...and after re-reading your post I see you made no such claim... Must have confused your post with another. All well, I shall hang my head in shame and move on.
It's about time we drop the kludge that is BIOS. EFI is also required for Windows to be able to boot from GUID partition table drives which in turn are going to be needed to handle upcoming huge drives that exceed BIOS LBA limitations.
I for one will not miss the BIOS. It's about time commodity PCs catch up to standards that Apple has implemented way back in 2006 (all Intel Macs use EFI and GPT).
Graceful as in data not related to your recent failed writes are still readable so they can be backed up and migrated to a new drive. Not sure why that concept is so difficult. I consider something dead as "completely unreadable, ALL your data has been destroyed - have a nice day."
No longer reliable but still semi recoverable isn't quite "dead."
Maybe I'm just using a stricter interpretation of the word dead than you are?
Let's use a marker on a white board analogy. If I was storing all my data on a suitably large white board using a marker and I completely exhausted my marker's supply of ink, I'd be pissed if this resulted in a blank whiteboard, wouldn't you? On that same note, if I wiped a small section of my whiteboard with the intent of writing something new in that area and only then realized that my marker was no longer suitably supplied with ink and my write failed, I would find the blank void in that section alone acceptable.
To accommodate these users, Kopete/Pidgin/Adium/etc should all remove their now-legacy Facebook plugins and just have a Facebook option that prompts for the username and password and sets the particulars up automatically. Much like most of them handle Google Talk currently.
That's the whole point of XMPP. If all IM was XMPP then IM WOULD work like e-mail. For this to work, Facebook still needs to enable Federation but it's a huge step in the right direction. The world needs more XMPP networks. Once the number of XMPP IM users outnumber the users of legacy "cluster-f**k" proprietary protocols it will become common sense to drop the proprietary garbage in order to gain interoperability with everyone else. What a nice utopia that would be.:)
They've included generic Jabber account details. You should be able to add Facebook to Kopete with this information. Is there really a need for specific step-by-step hand-holding for every client?
Now if only they'd setup federation so people can talk to those on Facebook from their own XMPP domain. This combined with Google Talk can bring XMPP near the critical mass of users necessary to finally abandon the proprietary protocols I've despised for so long. Good riddance Windows/MSN/Live Messenger! I look forward to the not-so-distant future where everyone can communicate on IM without having accounts with several non-interoperable IM networks. Wishful thinking?
Only one? Someone hasn't watched 'Office Space,' said movie should be viewed as a documentary of what's to come!
When I was your age (Holy crap, I can legitimately use that phrase in a sentence!) a neighbor well into his mid to late 70s made every attempt to assure me that the best years of life are when you're in school. For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Better leave it at that before I start to feel as archaic as my Slashdot UID makes me appear when matched up against yours.
Are you sure you'd want to? The typical work-day is longer than the typical adolescent school day... On the other hand, school doesn't bring a paycheck... Let me ponder this a bit longer before we make a deal.
Of course they still maintain their CDMA networks. It's not like they were going to pull the plug on all their existing clients in order to upgrade to GSM. A modern unlocked GSM phone will work just as well on Rogers/Tell/Bell now (assuming you could find such a thing). ie) The iPhone runs on Telus and Bell, let's not pretend Apple made a CDMA version just for Telus and Bell.
Your point stands that a CDMA based Telus or Bell Blackberry (as per your example) purchased prior to their new deployment will not work with Rogers but their legacy gear is irrelevant to this discussion, no?
Rogers is no longer the only GSM carrier. At the end of '09 Telus and Bell launched their own GSM networks. So counting Fido (owned by Rogers) there are now four Canadian GSM based carriers.
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Yep, missed a couple points on the original post. If the Airport Extreme has some issues with file and print sharing in Windows environments then the AirPort won't meet the original posters requirements. I paid a premium not for file and print sharing but for the 'dual band, great range' part. Also the 'routes packets without requiring a reboot on a daily basis' was fairly important to me as well. :)
Nice to know that it works in WINE, nice option for people that are exclusively running Linux. I use Macs primarily for my desktop machines, so for me it has never been an issue.
I have mine in bridge mode as well (behind a FreeBSD gateway) but I've set it up as a full out NAT router for many other people.
Uptime is certainly great:
lilpapa:~ denis$ snmpget -v 2c -c *REDACTED* airport DISMAN-EVENT-MIB::sysUpTimeInstance
DISMAN-EVENT-MIB::sysUpTimeInstance = Timeticks: (709918432) 82 days, 3:59:44.32
I'm sure if I investigated I'd figure out I either had a power outage or updated my config 82 days ago? ;)
Having worked in for several large scale WISPs for the last 8 years, I know I'm getting sick of the "My internet is broken" - "Power cycle your damn router" dialogue I hear over and over again on a daily basis. What's the uptime on a Linksys before a reboot is required nowadays, an hour or two?
...but it does have NAT-PMP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_Port_Mapping_Protocol an IETF standard that handles at least the NAT traversal features in a similar fashion. There's nothing else in UPNP that I care about. Although not everything supports NAT-PMP (PS3 for example, last I looked).
Still would be nice to have the option for those that need it, I suppose, but the lack of it has never concerned me in the slightest.
I've never had simular problems, what do you mean by "it takes Windows machines forever log into it" and "setting up printers can be a nighmare, and the Samba shares are hard to keep online," if I'm interpreting that correctly it sounds like you're actually using the disk and print sharing features of this router, or are you implying that Samba connections that just plain pass through it are giving you problems? If the latter, I've never seen such issues. If you're talking about the former, I don't actually use the file and print sharing features on the Airport, it could be complete garbage for all I know.
Then again, I'm the type that wants a router to "route" and a file server to share files. Any printer in 2010 that can't share itself over the network via a built in print server is also not worth my time.
Are you seeing any problems with non-disk and print sharing features?
It's a little bit expensive at ~ $200, but you get what you pay for. It has great features for the price and is rock solid. Dual-band 802.11N, Gigabit Ethernet, IPv6, SNMP, bridging and routing modes, etc, etc. The only drawback is the proprietary GUI required to configure it (no web interface). This is a show stopper it if you do not have a Windows or OS X based computer at your disposal, but few people are in that situation.
The only reason to pass it up is if you're one of those weirdoes that immediately write off anything with an Apple logo.
Beyond a few rare anomalies, every other consumer router I've used in nearly a decade has been complete garbage, I'd sooner build a PC based Linux or BSD gateway over dealing with that nonsense.
I would be all for having a Linux based firmware like coreboot replace our current mess that is the BIOS! Wonder if that could actually gain ground or if it's just a pipe dream though?
Must EFI by necessity bring "trusted computing" with it though? Maybe I need to take a closer look at the specs. Though Apple systems are EFI based, they haven't really used it to lock down the computer in any sort of way. Are you suggesting they simply haven't decided to do that but the capability is ready and waiting, not sure I follow how the two rela to each other. I keep bringing Aplle up in this discussion seeing as how I can't think of any other mainstream vendor that has ditched BIOS and/or adopted EFI.
If a system was completely locked down beyond my personal threshold of tolerance, I simply wouldn't buy said motherboard or system. It should be possible to adopt EFI without implementing the closed systems you fear, no?
This is why I prefer the Litres per 100 KM. It solves the problem this article describes.
Plus 'Gallon' is ambiguous.
ie) In Canada car ads often use imperial galons, but you may also see an American ad that uses US gallons. You have no way of knowing which the ad intended.
There is only one definition of Litre.
Interesting counterpoint - I mean that, not being sarcastic.
Maybe EFI isn't a golden solution, I'm not familiar enough with EFI on a low level to comment. Perhaps I just blindly support it because I just want 'SOMETHING' to replace BIOS. Specifically I like that the Mac platform can be entirely managed from the OS, ie) setting boot device priority, power management etc along side the rest of your OS settings. The whole PC model of having certain settings configured only in BIOS and others via the OS seems rather odd by modern standards. It gets quirkier when there are overlaps in features between BIOS settings and OS settings (power management being the best example).
I'd also like better features on power-up. Specifically, as I still setup a few headless PCs for BSD and Linux servers, it annoys me that serial console is not available until, at a minimum, you reach the bootloader of the OS. All 'settings' in BIOS are completely inaccessible in a headless serial environment as things currently stand.
I also rather enjoy the 'target disk mode' on Macs that will instantly turn your system into an external firewire attached drive on startup. This is extremely handy for recovering files from an unbootable or otherwise corrupt OS without having to physically remove the drive.
Adopting EFI wouldn't necessarily mean we gain such features, but it seems to me EFI would make such features more feasible. I guess in summary, I'm not necessarily pro EFI, but I want to see something far more modern and capable replace the obsolete BIOS we are currently stuck with.
Perhaps eliminating BIOS and adopting EFI isn't even necessary to unify things and address the limitations, I may just be equating the two even if they are not necessarily mutually inclusive.
Regardless, the PC world needs something better than BIOS, I'm not aware of any alternatives to EFI that may better accomodate this.
...and after re-reading your post I see you made no such claim... Must have confused your post with another. All well, I shall hang my head in shame and move on.
I remember such boards, but just because it had a GUI doesn't mean it wasn't BIOS. Simply it was a GUI based BIOS.
It's about time we drop the kludge that is BIOS. EFI is also required for Windows to be able to boot from GUID partition table drives which in turn are going to be needed to handle upcoming huge drives that exceed BIOS LBA limitations.
I for one will not miss the BIOS. It's about time commodity PCs catch up to standards that Apple has implemented way back in 2006 (all Intel Macs use EFI and GPT).
Graceful as in data not related to your recent failed writes are still readable so they can be backed up and migrated to a new drive. Not sure why that concept is so difficult. I consider something dead as "completely unreadable, ALL your data has been destroyed - have a nice day."
No longer reliable but still semi recoverable isn't quite "dead."
Maybe I'm just using a stricter interpretation of the word dead than you are?
Let's use a marker on a white board analogy. If I was storing all my data on a suitably large white board using a marker and I completely exhausted my marker's supply of ink, I'd be pissed if this resulted in a blank whiteboard, wouldn't you? On that same note, if I wiped a small section of my whiteboard with the intent of writing something new in that area and only then realized that my marker was no longer suitably supplied with ink and my write failed, I would find the blank void in that section alone acceptable.
Does that clarify things?
Right, but failing gracefully into a "no more writes" state is far better than an "I'm dead and I took your data with me" scenario.
I honestly don't know which is more common or if it varies amongst various flash storage devices, hence why I raised the question.
People in general should but don't have backups of their data so this distinction is pretty important.
You would think after the write cycles were exceeded the chips would be more or less read-only instead of 'dead.'
Am I mistaken on this presumption?
On that note, what about unzip, strip, touch and finger?
Sounds dangerously close to the #! line in UNIX shell scripts specifying the required interpretor.
Wonder if this same group will now find the shebang indecent.
Morons.
To accommodate these users, Kopete/Pidgin/Adium/etc should all remove their now-legacy Facebook plugins and just have a Facebook option that prompts for the username and password and sets the particulars up automatically. Much like most of them handle Google Talk currently.
That's the whole point of XMPP. If all IM was XMPP then IM WOULD work like e-mail. For this to work, Facebook still needs to enable Federation but it's a huge step in the right direction. The world needs more XMPP networks. Once the number of XMPP IM users outnumber the users of legacy "cluster-f**k" proprietary protocols it will become common sense to drop the proprietary garbage in order to gain interoperability with everyone else. What a nice utopia that would be. :)
They've included generic Jabber account details. You should be able to add Facebook to Kopete with this information. Is there really a need for specific step-by-step hand-holding for every client?
Now if only they'd setup federation so people can talk to those on Facebook from their own XMPP domain. This combined with Google Talk can bring XMPP near the critical mass of users necessary to finally abandon the proprietary protocols I've despised for so long. Good riddance Windows/MSN/Live Messenger! I look forward to the not-so-distant future where everyone can communicate on IM without having accounts with several non-interoperable IM networks. Wishful thinking?
Only one? Someone hasn't watched 'Office Space,' said movie should be viewed as a documentary of what's to come!
When I was your age (Holy crap, I can legitimately use that phrase in a sentence!) a neighbor well into his mid to late 70s made every attempt to assure me that the best years of life are when you're in school. For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Better leave it at that before I start to feel as archaic as my Slashdot UID makes me appear when matched up against yours.
Are you sure you'd want to? The typical work-day is longer than the typical adolescent school day... On the other hand, school doesn't bring a paycheck... Let me ponder this a bit longer before we make a deal.
'dc' is the only calculator you'll ever need!
Of course they still maintain their CDMA networks. It's not like they were going to pull the plug on all their existing clients in order to upgrade to GSM. A modern unlocked GSM phone will work just as well on Rogers/Tell/Bell now (assuming you could find such a thing). ie) The iPhone runs on Telus and Bell, let's not pretend Apple made a CDMA version just for Telus and Bell.
Your point stands that a CDMA based Telus or Bell Blackberry (as per your example) purchased prior to their new deployment will not work with Rogers but their legacy gear is irrelevant to this discussion, no?
Rogers is no longer the only GSM carrier. At the end of '09 Telus and Bell launched their own GSM networks. So counting Fido (owned by Rogers) there are now four Canadian GSM based carriers.