danobie
Level 1 (0 points)

Q: Cannot connect to Airport Extreme over IP

I have a new MacBook and Airport Extreme.  Everything is working fine (Internet, wireless, AirPort Utility), but I cannot see an Airport connected USB drive (exFAT/1024blocks), and cannot manually connect via AirPort- How to mount an AirPort Extreme USB hard disk volume in Mac OS X and Windows

 

I try the Finder > Connect To Server option, and it cannot connect to the Airport IP (I've switched it back and forth from 10.0.1.1 to 192.168.1.1), nor can I connect directly to the Airport via IP from Safari or from a windows machine. 

 

All devices connect to the Airport just fine(iPhones, iPad, AppleTV, Mac, Windows 7, etc.), get Internet access, and I can even see a shared windows file system from my Mac.

 

Airport has the latest firmware, and Macbook is 5 days old with latest updates

 

I've searched all over the forum and cannot find anyone with a similar problem.

 

Thoughts?

 

Thanks,

Obie.

MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011)

Posted on May 22, 2012 10:38 PM

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danobie

Q: Cannot connect to Airport Extreme over IP

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  • by Tesserax,Helpful

    Tesserax Tesserax May 23, 2012 7:53 AM in response to danobie
    Level 9 (54,874 points)
    Wireless
    May 23, 2012 7:53 AM in response to danobie

    Everything is working fine (Internet, wireless, AirPort Utility), but I cannot see an Airport connected USB drive (exFAT/1024blocks)..

    ... and therein lies the problem. The file server service of the AirPort Extreme can only work with USB HDDs formatted in either HFS+ or FAT16/32. ExFAT is not supported.

  • by danobie,

    danobie danobie May 23, 2012 8:06 AM in response to Tesserax
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 23, 2012 8:06 AM in response to Tesserax

    Thanks Tesserax, didn't realize that.  I've read a few discussions about the need to format with block sizes of 1024 or less.  Do you know if this is still the case to keep compatibility on the drive between Windows and Mac?

     

    I've been in windows for 20 years, and this is my first attempt at migrating to Mac.  If this is the only hiccup I come across, I'll be a happy camper...

  • by Tesserax,

    Tesserax Tesserax May 23, 2012 8:33 AM in response to danobie
    Level 9 (54,874 points)
    Wireless
    May 23, 2012 8:33 AM in response to danobie

    I haven't seen any Apple documentation around block sizes, but the following Apple Support article does offer a bit more detail on the support HDD formats.

     

    To get the "best" performance from the attached HDD, I would recommend that you format it with HFS+. Hopefully you can gain access to a Mac temporarily to do so. There are also a number of Windows utilities that can do this as well.

     

    The Extreme's file server service will share out the HDD using both the AFS & SMB file sharing protocols so that just about any OS X, Windows, or Linux network client can access it.

     

    ... and welcome to the Mac family!