Regret updating to AirPort Utility 6.0

Nice list Derek but 3a is incorrect.

3a) There is NO "Enable Guest Network" setting. You CANNOT create a guest network or name it or give it any settings. Why this is still listed in Help, I have no idea. Why the setting is gone: This is most likely because the technology behind guest networks, WPS, has been thoroughly CRACKED in the wild. Google "WPS cracked" for lots of documentation of the situation. It won't be resolved soon.

The feature that is missing is not "Enable Guest Network" it is "Add Wireless Clients" that is available in the 'Base Station' menu in other versions of the utility. You are correct about one thing, "Add Wireless Clients" is Apple's implementation of WPS but Apple's implementation is not susceptible to the exploit that was recently discovered. Apple does not hardwire the WPS code into the AirPort wireless base stations like other manufacturers do therefore it can't be exploited.

As for "Enable Guest Network" it is there in v6.0 under the 'Wireless' tab on supported base stations, the Extreme and Time Capsules.

When listing problems with this or any hardware utility please include the model revision of the hardware.

Airport Extreme N or G , 1st 2nd 3rd or 4th Gen.

Each have there own set of features.

A shiny-shiny thing, that cripples what was feature-rich before. Well played Apple.

Also WDS (Wireless Distribution System) has something wrong, i still don't understand if it is missing or simply FUBAR. The funny part is that this 6.0 shiny-box-of-horrors seems to understand it perfectly while drawing the pretty graph (i have kinda complex wds network made of many airport expresses here), since it shows wds repeaters in a hierarchical view, a thing that impressed me as soon as i have fired it up after the update. BUT WAIT! When i went to the options, i was shocked: they are all interpreted as "Create wireless network", which is obviously plain wrong, and from the dropdown menu there is nothing like wds (no, extend wireless network is repeater mode, which is not WDS).

Random rants from a sysadmin's point of view below:

Admins need control and monitoring, features, logs scrolling on the screen, snmp to make graphs with cacti and to monitor with nagios. Not shiny stuff that makes you say "oooh looks like Minority Report, *swoosh* *swoosh* (sound of sweeping/zooming gestures on a useless but looking-good network utility)". We don't care and we do not want any of that if it cripples even the smallest feature of what was a great product: we like the *swoosh*-zoom thing for sure, but not at the expense of something useful.

Reverted to 5.6. And to join forces with the user that suggested this might be linked to the loss of a noble leader: if this is the first sign of what kind products we should expect after Mr. Jobs's demise, well i'll be also reverting to linux (thing i already did for our servers after a craptacular and ludicrous fail of a software raid in a mac mini server, followed by the "SoHo/hobbistic derive" osx server took with lion. And no, linux software raids do not have problems that can make the rebuild process impossible or mark all the drives in the array as faulty when one of them fails, don't give me "if you had an hardware raid card...").

Version 6 is a re-write of the software that is incomplete featurewise. It appears to have been released for those people who have transitioned to iCloud and lost the 'Back to my Mac' functionailty that allowed remote access to shared AirPort disks.

Version 6 will continue to be updated to include all the functionanlity that is presently in Version 5.x. That is why a parallel release of 5.6 was released.

The only thing that will be lost once Version 6 has reached functional parity to version 5.x will be the ability to configure older b/g only Airport devices and the ability to run on OSs prior to 10.7

I can understand that, but there was a time when this was called a pre-alpha or a beta. Not an automatic update that requires me to go and download an uncrippled version that i already had before an update that is supposed by definition to (is it still true today?) give me more and more stable features. An optional download for the brave and/or those who do not need the still unsupported features, not what by default is installed on live machines.

Not an automatic update that requires me to go and download an uncrippled version that i already had before an update that is supposed by definition to (is it still true today?)

AirPort Utility 5.6 was released yesterday. Are you saying that you already had it on your Mac before that?

I had the previous version. I was referring to features, to get those back i had to download something, since the automatic update removed those features.

EDIT: To be more precise i had 5.4, feature-rich airport utility. The updater tells me to upgrade to 6.0, a demo of what airport utility is going to be some time ahead, i click ok. 5.4 is removed and after that i find myself with an useless graph called 6.0 instead of the feature-rich 5.4. So i have to download 5.6 to regain the functionality i had in 5.4. Am I the only one that finds this scheme awkward?

Message was edited by: J0YsTiCK

Thank you for the link to downgrade the Airport Utility. I had to set-up a couple of networks witht the new 6.0 version and each time it was a drama!

Someting that should be a 15 minute job took 2 hours of strugling each time...

Apple should fix this. We need the missing features back.

Another possible bug has to do with iCloud and configuring VPN (L2TP) port mappings.

In text, the error message:

A public UDP port conflicts with the iCloud ports on the base station. Disable iCloud or choose a different port number.

All I did was click in the public TCP ports field. There is nothing in the new 6.0 AirPort utility about iCloud configurations... at least as far as I could find. I know from web-search that for the L2TP-flavor of VPN, one need only open ports 500, 1701 & 4500 for UDP. The port TCP 1723 is only needed if one were to set up VPN using PPTP, which reportedly can only be done via command line.

Have you read this: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3944

This would not be a bug with AU 6.0. Hope it helps.

Perhaps the "Back to My Mac" configs on the Base Station tab are what constitute the iCloud configuration.

It would be nice to know if there is a developer's door to get at the missing stuff from AU 5.6 and previous releases.

Yes, the "Back to My Mac" settings in v6.0 are the ones for iCloud. That's why it no longer uses the "MobileMe" name.

Seriously, can't you people be a little patient and allow Apple the time to complete the re-write of version 6. They've released v5.6 precisely to hold you over so I really don't understand all this hand-wringing.

This is off topic for this thread but…

If you consider that setting up a VPN to access the network makes "Back to My Mac" access to the router redundant then having to disable "Back to My Mac" in the router isn't really much of a loss.

Hey Fellas,

just like to confirm, with airport utility 5.6 everything works fine!

After a router change, my 1st gen Aiport Express wasn't able to connect to my network (the airport utility 6.0 didn't see it at all) even after a hard reset.

I've just rolled back to airport utility 5.6 and....WORKS FINE!!

so thanks for the advice and I can recommend to anybody who experiences the same issue.

cheers.

burger