Since I already have a WDS network main station (trendnet) that I thought it would be easy to use the existing WEP hex password like I did with my Airport Express (simply take the hex password and add a "$" before it.)

Unfortunately the new Airport Extreme only allows 13 characters in its WEP Transitional Security Network so I could not get all of the long string of hexadecimal characters in from my old password. I could not use the old WEP password either for some reason.

Finally I thought I would make the new Airport Extreme's WEP Transitional Security Network and then take that hexadecimal code and put this into the old Trendnet device. My problem was that I could not find the hexadecimal equivalent of the password I typed into the AirPort Utility software.

I finally found out how to retrieve this hexadecimal code from the Apple support site. After you have entered a password into the Airport Extreme you can get the hexadecimal version of it with the following steps.

1. 
   
2. log onto the Airport Extreme using the Airport Utility software
3. 
   
4. select the "Base Station" menu item from the top of the screen/ window
5. 
   
6. select the "Equivalent Network Password"
7. 
   
8. and voila, a little window will appear showing you your WPA Password/ ASCII WEP Key and it's hex equivalent.
9. 
   
10. take this hex code and enter it into the other side of your WDS connection.
11. 
    

Now my DSL modem offers the Internet through my Trendnet wireless bridge at 54mbps and my MacBook can log on to the Airport Extreme at 130mbps with 802.11n to access the Internet and the rest of my local wired network.

Note: I have to use WEP for the WDS since I cannot get the Trendnet device to authenticate with anything better.

Tags: Airport, wds

Of course the first thing I did with my Airport Extreme base station (7.2.1) was to try to share a USB hard drive over it. What I found was that the shared disk drive would not automount on my new Leopard MacOSX system. Fortunately after much searching I found my answer on the Apple Forums. You basically had to remove the Airport utilities and reinstall them from the Airport Extreme Installation CDROM.

1. In System preference > Acounts > Login Items, remove Airport Base Station Agent
2. Reboot
3. On the hard disk Macintosh HD > System > Library > CoreServices delete the Airport Base Station Agent and Apple80211Agent
4. Reinstall the Airport Extreme software from the Install CDROM
5. In System preference > Acounts > Login Items, add Airport Base Station Agent from its location in the hard disk Macintosh HD > System > Library > CoreServices folder
   

After the next reboot the USB drive should auto-mount again.

Tags: Airport Disk

Although Apple's Airport Extreme can share a printer it was not quite so easy to use from my Vista Business computer. The instructions from Apple had me able to print only half a page to my USB HP Deskjet. Then the print job would error out. To make matters worse I could not delete the print job either.

So, here's what worked for me and hopefully for anyone else with this problem.

1. In your Printer Properties > Ports tab, disable "Enable bidirectional support". This allowed me to delete the print jobs.
2. In your Printer Properties > Advanced tab, disable "Enable advanced printing features". This allowed me to print whole pages.
   

I don't know if it will work for every printer but I can now print from my Vista computer.

Tags: printing, Airport

Well, maybe you know this already but at least the older versions of Outlook like 2000 use the web browser Internet Explorer (IE) to render the HTML emails. So what? Well, Outlook also takes the page margins as defined in IE and uses thoses when you try to print an HTML based email the header uses the Outlook margin settings and the email message uses the Internet Explorer margin settings.

If you have your IE margins set tozero then when you print your emails your printer will probably cut off the left side of your message (even if your print preview looks okay). In that case you need to be sure that your Outlook and IE margins are configured the same.

Tags: Outlook, Html mail

I was eligible and registered for a low price MacOSX 10.5 Leopard upgrade because I had bought my Macbook in October. The upgrade would probably be sent a few weeks after the Friday release date, I had thought. I was still looking forward tothe new release and followed it on their website for the release.

Late on Friday I received an email from Apple saying that my MacOSX upgrade had shipped and that I should receive it in a couple of days. Sure enough, I received it a few days later. I did not expect such great coordinated service, especially considering that I live in Switzerland. Way to go Apple!

Tags: customer service