Airport Express

My Airport Express, which is about 2-3 years old and only used for playing music from iTunes, is beginning to shuffle off its mortal coil...

After an hour or so from switch-on it begins to periodically drop the wireless connection for a few seconds, at intervals of a few to about 10 minutes. Not conducive to relaxed listening. It seems to run hotter than I remember, but I can't be entirely sure of that.

Question- should I just shrug and buy a new one, or is there something else around which will perform the same function (I neither need or want any fancy bells and whistles) for a lower or comparable price?

(I'm assuming that getting Apple to repair it isn't a worthwhile option)

Edited by billford (Tue 14-Jun-11 22:53:23)

You could buy a decent PC with a WIC and HD and it would do the same job for far less money. Obviously it would not have 'middle-class' appeal like your Mac 'with rims and lowered springs' does though. Dam ricer.

In reply to a post by 12eason:

You could buy a decent PC with a WIC and HD and it would do the same job for far less money.

Size, price, power consumption and noise.

Obviously it would not have 'middle-class' appeal like your Mac 'with rims and lowered springs' does though. Dam ricer.

Go away and grow up.

In reply to a post by billford:

Go away and grow up.

How very dare you. Mac users are so rude.

What a remarkably stupid reply to a perfectly sensible question.

And if you feed the troll he will just come back.

Unless bill has already done the necessary.

Both my Airport Express and Airport Extreme have been exhibiting this behaviour ever since I got my Billion 7800N router. The log typically shows an endless list of the following:

Jun 15 03:57:11 Severity:5 Disconnected from network.
Jun 15 03:57:14 Severity:5 Joined BSS 00:04:ed:97:fb:2d
Jun 15 03:57:15 Severity:5 Installed unicast CCMP key for authenticator 00:04:ed:97:fb:2d

Both units work fine apart from these connection drops that last only a couple of seconds. I think the problem is with the Airport units rather than the Billion router and I have also tried some tweaks to the router settings to no avail.

I do not think either of my Airport units is defective as such, rather incompatible in some way with the Billion router. The Express only provides a wireless connection to the ftp server in my Foxsat HDR recorder and I can transfer files with no problems because the transfer just resumes when the Express come s back up. The Extreme is currently only used to provide wireless connection to my Samsung laser printer and again, in that role the drops cause no problems, but it is annoying nevertheless.

Yup, that's the message I get (only ten minutes after startup this time) and yup, I've just put in a 7800N router

Intriguing... some food for thought there, and head-scratching for a work-around.

Thanks

There can be loads of wireless routers in the vicinity. Tried changing channel?

Until you got the electric bill and saw the PC had used twice as much power.

You were the one trolling.

Do you carry around a PC to use as an MP3 player too?

We're quite aware that PCs can do lots of things, but they're noisy, use lots of power and damned ugly.

An airport express router is barely larger than a plug and uses very little power as it is an appliance.

You can use a PC to cook an egg too. But I'd much sooner use a frying pan:

http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/~htsu/humor/fry_egg.html

Bill, I was in touch with Billion support on this and they showed me how to change some settings that had been recommended on the web. The settings are:

iwpriv ra0 set BeaconPeriod=75
iwpriv ra0 set RTS threshold=2307
iwpriv ra0 set FragThreshold=2304

You can set these on the Billion 7800N using Terminal as follows:

1. Open command prompt.
2. Type 'telnet 192.168.1.254'
3. Enter your username and password set to the 7800N
4. Type 'iwpriv ra0 set BeaconPeriod=75'
5. Type 'iwpriv ra0 set RTS threshold=2307'
6. Type 'iwpriv ra0 set FragThreshold=2304'
7. Type 'save'
8. Type 'Logout'

Without the quotes, obviously

I have also tried setting BeaconPeriod to a low as 25 but nothing came of it.

Should you wish to reset the default values just use the above commands with these values:

BeaconPeriod 100
RTSthreshold 2347
Fragthreshold 2346

Printed out for future reference, thank you

I don't want to change any router settings yet, I'm trying to track down an occasional IPv6-related problem that only occurs every 3-4 days, at the moment I don't know whether to shout at Billion or my ISP

Anyway, for the moment I can now listen to music without annoying breaks... I turned the AEX's wireless off and connected using Ethernet via a spare homeplug I happened to have around. You can't beat brute force

Not ideal for a variety of reasons, but it'll do until I can try your suggestion.

As a side issue, I asked Billion support if there was any sort of list as to what could be done via telnet. The reply wasn't what I wanted, but it was what I expected:

We are sorry but Telent or CLI is not supported by 7800N.

In reply to a post by gilesjuk:

There can be loads of wireless routers in the vicinity. Tried changing channel?

Yes, I went through all that with the laptops when I swapped the Airport Extreme for the Billion. It was fine on the 5GHz band (nobody else using it) but selecting Auto channel selection on 2.4GHz was a seriously bad idea... so with the aid of iStumbler it's now on channel 4 and working well

I don't think it's Apple or Billion related- someone I know on another forum had exactly the same problem with a PC, iPhone and Netgear router. Though interestingly, he manually selected the same channel that Auto had, and the problems disappeared

Edited by billford (Wed 15-Jun-11 13:36:02)

I started getting drop outs on my Airport Express & Airport Extreme's a year or so ago; took me ages to work out what was causing it.....

It's the later firmwares for these that cause my problems.

Downgrading to 7.3.2; and I can stream HD videos no problem at all; going up to 7.5.2 (or anything higher than 7.3.2 in fact) caused juddering video, and random disconnections.

Might be worth a go at downgrading the firmware on the Airport first.

Alan

I had issued on 7.5.2 as well, similar to what is listed here.

Back to 7.4.2 and all is fine. Have tried 7.5.2 since but same issue.

Matt

How do you go about reverting an Airport device back to an earlier firmware release?

First off, download the firmware that you want to downgrade to - it can be found on the Apple website here {edit - that link doesn't work really - it looks like it'll take you to places to download the firmware from, but they don't work - nice job Apple}

Once you have the firmware, start up Airport Utility, highlight your Airport and click Manual setup.

Go to the 'Base Station' drop down menu, and select 'Upload firmware'

A window will appear, and in the 'Upload Version' box, select 'Other...' {edit: Hopefully you will have older firmwares listed in the drop down list, as you can't download older firmwares at the moment}

Choose the firmware file that you downloaded earlier, and upload that to the router. {edit: as above}

Alan

It looks like there are 2 links for the 7.3.2 firmware:

1 - version 107 (this one works on my Airport Express)

2- version 106

3 - version 105 (this one works on my Airport Extreme)

4- version 104

If one doesn't work, try the other - it'll warn you if it's the wrong version for your device, and won't let you proceed (well that's my experience anyway)

Thanks, I'd never noticed that "Upload firmware" on the menu

So the tricky bit is finding the firmware file... that figures


eta- we crossed in the router... thanks for those links

Edited by billford (Sun 19-Jun-11 13:43:08)

Been having a google around for what else might be on that site, nothing useful to me but a possibly handy tip in a MacRumours topic:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1065445

Post No 7.

Hmm... I haven't actually tried it, but it looks as though the "Upload firmware" dialog reads that .xml file to allow easy down-grading to versions that are OK for your hardware (?).

It may be that it shows versions you've used before, but the list on mine goes back to 7.3 and I don't think I've had it that long

edit:

After more thought, it's the iMac that's new-ish, I've had the Express for some while. Implying that the update history is kept on the device and read by the Airport Utility... not convenient to put the Extreme back in atm, but it'll be interesting to see if an appropriate file automagically appears when I can and fire it up...

Edited by billford (Sun 19-Jun-11 15:00:33)

In reply to a post by Adrian:

Bill, I was in touch with Billion support on this and they showed me how to change some settings that had been recommended on the web.

I finally got around to making the changes and everything seems to be fine, I've even got a spare homeplug again

One question- I assume the changes won't survive anything that initiates a "Reset to factory defaults"?

I saved the config in flash and a .conf file, but I suspect neither will help.

Post deleted by billford

Edited by billford (Tue 21-Jun-11 01:16:15)

Weird...

As I said, it works.

But when you stop playing music (ie kill the Airtunes stream) the disconnect/join/unicast messages return, every 5 minutes.

Start playing again and the messages disappear... not really a major problem except that it fills the log up rather quickly!

I can't remember if it did it with the Extreme or not... I don't think it did, but could easily be wrong.

As a follow on, see this Airport Utility update.