Q: Multiple Airport devices with Apple IDs disappear from shared devices and Airport Configuration software
We have three Airport Extremes and two Airport Express devices at two offices in town. Sometime in the last couple of days, they have all stopped appearing in the "Shared" Finder sidebar category (if they had attached disk storage) and they have stopped appearing in the Airport Configuration software on any of the Macs on those networks. (They still seem to be routing traffic okay, though.)
For a while we left one office completely alone as a control group, and did all our testing and troubleshooting at the other office.
We hard-reset (to factory configuration) all the Airport devices at one office. They began showing up again. Then we began re-configuring them again. By the time we'd updated the devices, they had disappeared again.
So—another factory reset to base configutation for each device at that installation. Then we slowly added in bits of their configuration. The moment the Airports were given Apple IDs and associated passwords for associating with iCloud/BackToMyMac/WideAreaBonjour (whichever you wish to call it), the Airport Devices disappeared from the Airport Configuration program.
If we attempted to configure another Airport device to extend a network comprised of "invisible" Airports, the new Airports were "unable to find" any of those networks to extend.
If we reset all the devices without providing them with Apple ID and passwords, they worked mostly as you'd expect. The principal difference being they now won't show up as having been registered as BackToMyMac/WideAreaBonjour devices.
One side note for folks dealing with this: If your router devices are invisible, but they are configured to be configured from the WAN in the greater world, you can use "File->Configure Other" and specify the missing device's WAN address and get that access screen as one generally would. From there, remove all the Apple IDs associated with these devices, press "Update" to save the settings, and they seem to magically re-appear in the Airport Configuration software.
In this last state, attached storage does seem to become available again, but only to the Local (direct connection) domain devices. The Airports without AppleIDs will not appear in the iCloud/BackToMyMac/WideAreaBonjour domain, and that's as expected, since those IDs are the means for their domain identification.
Has anyone else noted these behaviors, and if so, have an idea about specifically when they arose? Is there by chance anyone who knows of any changes in registering or propagating the BTMM?
MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10), Interoperability with iOS 8.0 & 8.1
Posted on Aug 10, 2016 8:12 AM
Apple appears to have fixed the problem some time today.
It may or may not be fixed for everyone, so confirm when you get a chance.
Posted on Aug 18, 2016 4:39 PM