Mar 27th, 08
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I don’t completely understand how logging works, but it is very Unix-like, every application can create its own text-based .log file. Unlike Windows which has a complicated event viewer system and a separate application to look at records. There is /Applications/Utility/Console which gives you one place to look at everything.
But what about event logs and looking at internet traffic on Apple’s wireless routers like the Extreme or the Time Capsule. It turns out that these are just Unix machines as well, so you can use the Unix remote logs there and actually login to the base station with a command line. Very elegant really. So you can look at logs by:
- Start Airport Utility and click on the access point you want to examine
- Click on the Manual Setup
- Click on the Advanced button at the top
- In Logging and Statistics page, click on Log and Statistics
Note that unlike D-link and others, this doesn’t seem to log internet access records, but just what is going on with the router itself.
Or you can record them on your Mac as noted in
AirPort Extreme: Remotely logging base station activity To set up remote logging, you will create a log file for AirPort, then modify the syslog.conf file. These steps use the pico text editor, though other editors could be used.
1. In either AirPort Admin Utility or AirPort Management Utility, enter the logging computer’s IP address in the “Send Base Station Logging to” field.
2. Update the base station with the configuration change and wait for it to finish restarting.
3. At the computer, be sure you are logged in with an administrator account.
4. Open Terminal, and execute these commands:
# sudo touch /var/log/AirPort.log
# sudo pico /etc/syslog.conf
5. Using the arrow keys, scroll to the bottom of the file, and add this line:
local0.* /var/log/AirPort.log
6. To save and close the file, press Control-O, Return, and Control-X.
7. Execute this command:
# sudo syslogd -m 0 -u
Note: “0″ is a number, not a letter.
8. Once you are finished gathering the desired logs, press Control-C to stop the running process.
9. The result of the Base Station logging can be found in /var/log/AirPort.log or in the /var/log/system.log.
Mar 24th, 08
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Normally at work, we have two networks, an unprotected and a protected wifi network, here’s a cool way to implement this. We are going to try this at our Seattle office.
Internally
If you are lucky, you have all new machines from Apple (yeah!) that are 802.11n. These are all the late model MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. So now you can have a fast and much safer network. Here is what you need to do:
Set, your AirPort Utility>Airport>Wireless to 802.11n (5GHz) and “use wide channels”. What this does is to push all those MacBooks into the fresh air of 5GHz out of all those 2.4GHz standard cards. That means you have clean radio frequencies and if you aren’t pushing range (2.4GHz propagates better than 5GHz) like an open office, you are going to go from 130Mbps to 270Mbps because wide channel uses twice the channel width so you get double the data. It is also safer in that most laptops only have 2.4GHz radios and should have less interference.
I’ve tried this with an Time Capsule and the results are a little surprising. Copying a 350MB file, here are the speeds I got:
| Upload to TC | Download to Mac |
| 802.11n wide channel 5GHz | Macbook Air | 22MBps | 78MBps |
| 802.11n (b/g compatibility 2.4GHz | Macbook Air | 6MBps | 6MBps |
So the loading seems asymmetric as if the MacBook Air has some other issues. The 78MBps is pretty impressive for real world through compared with the 300Mbps theoretical maximum (or 30MBps). The 22MBps seems closer to what is real, so maybe there is some buffering or something going on. Both are impressive though compared with the 802.11n/b/g performance. As an aside, this is with a single computer no the network, so all this bandwidth has to be shared, that is why switched wired Ethernet is still better, each port-to-port connection gets the full 100Mbps or 1Gbps (in Gigabit case).
The conventional 802.11n with a theoretic capacity of 108Mbps seems about right. It is symmetric with a true over the air throughput of 6MBps (about 60Mbps) and on the disk, I get 5.5MBps of disk transfer.
External
Then you can setup another Airport Base Station Extreme or even an el cheapo Airport to 802.11b/g at 2.4GHz and leave this open. This lets devices that are presumably not from your company in. I would put this on the open Internet so folks can have basic access and such.
Mar 7th, 08
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Canon printers have never really gotten along with Macs. I wish I knew that before I bought my i9900 at home and Pro9000 at work. Apparently for instance, ou can’t print over the network. Things are a little better with the Pro9000, but apparently, it is very difficult to get them to work off the USB port of an Airport Extreme. “Apple Discussions” reports that this is a big problem. The apparent solution is from http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6648645
- Download the very latest Canon drivers. these are dated December 2007. There two versions, one is a CUPS driver and the other regular. Apparently you use the non-CUPS one at Canon
- When you add the Canon Pro9000, add it as a generic Canon IJ Printer rather than the specific Pro 9000. No one knows why this works, but you remove the Printer, then add it again. You fix this in the Print Using field
- Discussions.apple.com mentions that there is a generic problem with printing from an Airport Extreme base station which recommends using Apple’s Printer troubleshooting that is pretty generic and involves just checking the Airport Extreme sees it and deleting the printer queue on your Mac. But some say the generic issue is that the Airport Extreme Base Station sends too much down the USB port (no flow control I guess) so it overloads it. There is an Applescript that tries to slow this down called AirPrintFix which you make a startup item as the author described to Macosxhintg.com. He used a tool Eavesdrop which listens in on a TCP connection over your Ethernet.
