Out with the old, in with the new
Since I got the Mac Mini, I’ve been feeling exposed – I didn’t have a good way to back it up. Home Server will support it after some hackery, but I want to migrate away from WHS, not increase my reliance on it. Net net, I picked up a Time Capsule; I replaced the wifi/gigabit switch pairing that’s always been a little goofy and turned up the 5GHz networking to get away from the saturated 2.4GHz band. It’s nice to pull out a bunch of power supplies and network hairballs to replace it with a little white box.
I did some side-by-side tests with the Cisco and the Time Capsule, and it looks like I got just about the same coverage on 2.4GHz, a little more coverage out front with the Cisco, a little more out back with the Apple. I didn’t make any effort to try all orientations, but my apartment and back yard still has coverage, and that’s all I care about.
It wasn’t entirely smooth, though; I found a 100% repro bug in the configuration tool that causes it to lose port forwarding settings. To reproduce, create a port forward with a name that has a colon, like “MACHINE:PROTOCOL” (or HABU:BT in my case). Input your ports as usual, save, edit, they’re there, apply. Once the device reboots, go to the same place and see your ports are missing; you can check that they aren’t actually forwarded, either, or you can trust me when I say they aren’t. Very annoying. The reboot to change any configuration setting is annoying, too; hopefully now that I’ve done whatever fuckery was needed to get my shit set up, I’m done with that.
