I’m probably not the only person on the block who has thought that of the various user experiences in the many applications that make up Mac OS X, network settings have been some of the worst. Apparently Apple agreed, because the various network settings have probably gotten the most reorganization of any other settings in the operating system to be much more intuitive and much friendlier to the common man, while still retaining the power and control that many IT users need. This weekend (Saturday and Sunday) has a two-part Leopard Feature Presentation on the network tools that make up Mac OS X. Today’s presentation looks at AirPort Utility, the built-in setup and management software for those of you with an AirPort Extreme or Express Base Station. I was going to give this a pretty good review at first, but now that this application has completely screwed me, I’m going to start begging for some help.

But first, the initial review. I will definitely say that it appears as though Apple has done a lot of refining, as the application is more streamlined. To use the overused analogy, Apple treats it a lot like iTunes. On the left is a list of any AirPort base stations that can be found, and selecting one shows the status of the base station. You can continue through the screens to get a nice step-by-step setup assistant for setting up your AirPort network, or if you miss some of the “everything at your fingertips” access, you can click on the Manual Setup button. Even then, the settings have been nicely redivided up into categories, and there’s even a Spotlight search box that lets you search for specific settings.

When I first tried this out, I thought that this was definitely a more friendly setup than there had been before, and I reconfigured my AirPort Express Base Station using some of the new settings, and was happy. But then, my parents, who are on an older PowerMac G4 running on an older 802.11b-only AirPort Card, found that they could no longer connect to the base station. The older AirPort Cards only support WPA encryption and do not support the newer WPA2 encryption that the newer Extreme-based cards support. This shouldn’t have been a problem though, because the AirPort Express was set to WPA/WPA2 Personal, which means that it should have worked with both WPA and WPA2 password encryption. It should have but it was completely rejecting (or, returning an error, anyway) the WPA login! This caused me a LOT of grief, trying to explain to my parents not only what the problem was, but the fact that it was SUPPOSED to be working. I don’t even know what changed, because I had previously had the AirPort Express on the EXACT SAME WPA/WPA2 encryption settings, but they worked!!! After a lot of late-night stress trying to figure out why the heck it wasn’t working, I finally removed the password. Our network is now completely open and unencrypted. I’m figuring that we’ll be okay as long as the Mac OS X Firewall is kept on and high.

(By the way, after much searching, it turns out that the Firewall settings have been moved from the Sharing panel to the Security panel of System Preferences.)

Anyway, the layout of the new AirPort Utility is definitely much more streamlined, intuitive, and accessible, but also seems to be broken, and has certainly messed up something about my AirPort Express Base Station. Anyone have any tips for how I can fix it?

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: accessibility, AirPort, base station, broken, firewall, Help, interface, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, review, security, utility, wifi, wireless, WPA