How to share disks with an AirPort Extreme Base Station

• Article 44 of 89
• MacFormat, June 2007

There was a certain “what’s the point” quality to the AirPort Extreme Base Station of old. Banned in the EU at the end of its lifespan for containing toxic chemicals, the AEBS didn’t have much more to offer than the router that comes free with your home broadband package. 802.11g networking? Check. A couple of Ethernet ports? Check. Firewall, NAT routing, DMZ? Check, check, check.

Okay, it had a few nice things, such as the ability to share a USB printer, Bonjour discovery, the wireless distribution system for extending the network range and the aesthetically pleasing configuration utility that came with it. But for £100 or more, you’d have at least expected it to come with an ADSL modem.

The new AirPort Extreme Base Station, released to less fanfare but probably to more plaudits than the Apple TV, changes that. Finally, there are some features that your free router just won’t have – and that you might actually want.

Top of the list is 802.11n networking, which is faster than standard 100baseT Ethernet and works with more or less any Mac that has a Core Duo 2 chip. If you plan on buying an Apple TV, you’ll almost certainly want one of the new AEBSs within a week so you can shunt all your massive video files around without having to plan a winter break in the middle of it all.

But even if that weren’t enough, the ability to share hard drives on your network without having to connect them to a Mac. At the back of the latest AEBS is the same old USB port as the previous base station. But not only can you connect a printer to the port, you can connect a USB 2.0-capable disk drive and it will be available as a server to any Mac or PC on the network. If you have more than one disk or a printer you’d like to share as well, you can simply connect a USB hub to the port and daisy chain them all together. This is a great way to have your own server without having to have your Mac running all the time, having to allow interlopers onto your machine with their own user accounts, or using up valuable hard drive space. Just plug and go.

Well, almost. You can simply plug in your disks and the AEBS will share them on the network. But the AEBS disk sharing system does contain some quite powerful features, including user accounts, guest access, read/write privileges and more that aren’t turned on by default but which you can configure using the AirPort Disk Utility. And we’re going to show you how to set them up.

For this tutorial, you’ll need one of the new AirPort Extreme Base Stations (obviously) and a USB 2.0 hard drive (not an iPod and it’ll need to have an external power supply, not be USB-powered). You’ll also need to have installed and updated the AirPort software that came with your AEBS on all the Macs and PCs you intend to use with the hard disks – it’s not absolutely necessary, but it’ll make things easier and ensure you can get all that 802.11n speed.