As dedicated LWL fans, you surely know that I experienced an electrical surge last month, resulting in some weird issues with some of the gadgets in my apartment (read about my attempts to get Iomega and Amazon to replace a fried power supply for one of my hard drives).
What you may not know is that my router, a Linksys WRT54GL, and my AirPort Express base station, were both restored to factory default settings in the surge. For a year I’d been using the WRT54GL for my internet surfing at home, having tinkered with the settings to get maximum download speeds for Bit Torrent, and I used the excellent AirTunes feature in iTunes to send music and podcasts to speakers in different parts of my apartment via my AirPort Express, which extended the WRT54GL’s network.
That was all wiped clean a month ago, but it only became relevant to try fixing it last week, as I received a new power supply for my hard drive and was able to access my iTunes library.
I knew it would be difficult to get everything running again properly, but I had no idea how difficult. There is some good advice available online. In particular, Amit Gupta’s advice got me close, even painfully close. Jake Smith also seemed to have been successful. But I couldn’t get mine working.
After trying for the better part of a week, the closest I could get was to have the setup operational except that the AirPort Express had to be wired by ethernet to the WRT54GL – no good, since I don’t really feel like drilling holes through the walls in my apartment to run the cord all the way to the other side – or that it would be operational except without any security at all – no good, since I’m not emotionally ready to let every random stranger in the neighborhood see which television programs and movies I’m downloading.
Eventually I started getting an unbearably annoying error message, WDS Error: This Apple wireless device is set up as part of a WDS network but no other Apple wireless devices were found. Yeah, of course no other Apple wireless devices were found – but does Apple really expect that I’ll only use Apple devices exclusively with other Apple devices?
Then something occurred to me: I actually own another Apple wireless device. It’s an AirPort Extreme base station that I got in 2004 and haven’t been using recently, since I’d gotten the splendid Linksys WRT54GL router. So hooked up my computer to the Airport Extreme and hooked the Airport Extreme to the WRT54GL. Then I followed Amit Gupta’s instructions above for connecting the AirPort Extreme to the WRT54GL’s WDS network. Then I set up the AirPort Express wirelessly, but after trying and failing many times to establish a relay -> remote setup (ie, using the AirPort Extreme as a relay/remote and the Airport Express as a remote), I eventually tried setting the AirPort Express to “join a wireless network.” And it worked!
It’s awesome that Apple has such a great feature as AirTunes, but for crying out loud, the world wide web is littered with confused and frustrated forum posts by people trying to make their AirPort Extremes work and failing miserably. Or worse, they can plug the pieces into the wall and make it operate a network, but they can’t configure the network properly and can’t use it for all it’s meant to do. As easy as it is for my Mac to join a Windows network, that is how easy it should be for my AirPort Express to join a wifi network established by a Linksys router. Why doesn’t Apple realize this?
So the power supply finally came from Iomega?
It came. And the second one they sent also came. Now I’m just waiting for the one I bought when I thought Iomega had given up on me.