Airport HDDs

I've connected a 1TB drive to the USB port on my Airport Extreme. No problems but...

I want to reformat it, but according to the Airport Utility Help:

AirPort Utility does not support formatting disks. Format the hard disk using your computer.

I assumed this meant I'd just use Disk Utility, but it doesn't see it.

Does it mean that I have to connect it direct to the computer (iMac) to format it, or am I missing something again?

According to this thread you do have to connect the drive directly to your computer to format it. I'm not that surprised - most network file systems don't allow disk formatting over the network. I can understand why that might be thought a good idea.

Oh bother. (The filter would take out what I wanted to say )

More cable grovelling... thanks for the link.