Mika Tuupola

Thou shall not trust the automatic software updates from Apple. For several years I have been using both Graphite and Snow versions of Apple AirPort without any problems. Recently I had to do some configuration changes to the base station in order to make it work with my PlayStation 2. I fired up the Airport Admin tool and entered the password. Upon logging in the Admin Tool offered to upgrade AirPort Firmware to 4.0.8. The update went in. The BaseStation rebooted. Great, I though. Now I just continue to make the configuration changes needed for PlayStation co-operation.

Then the problems started. Everytime I try to log in the AirPort Admin utility just crashes. No error message. No nothing. It just crashes. Additionally the OSX started to randomly hang forcing me to reboot the OS. Looking at the signal strength cauge I can see the signal go up and down from zero to full even when I am standing one meter away from the base station. This also causes my PowerBook to randomly drop connection forcing me to reconnect to the network (this is if the OS did not happen to hang).

Did some Googling on this and found out others have the same problem too. The solution would be to to downgrade the firmware back to the previous version. Only problem being the fact that the Admin Utility does not work anymore. I even tried the freeware Java version which just timeouts trying to read the configuration.

So I guess I need a Windows machine to fix the problem. Too many wasted hours. So long, and thanks for all the upgrades.