A reminder about software aging

Networking & Firewalls
1

I have a number of Apple Time Capsules (AIrport Extremes with disks in them) which I have tried to upgrade, and failed, a couple of times. One time because the access points I tried incompletely bridged from wireless to wired network and this broke all the Bonjour/mDNS services that needed to cross wired to wireless (looking at you Google!). The other one I tried was Synology’s mesh kit - but that was slower than the Airports.

Sadly it looks like I will need to start planning on replacing them soon. Apple provides a utility to configure the Airports (which I dislike - I much prefer having an on device HTML based config). I hit a bug on an M1 mac running Ventura in the utility. It no longer allows long WPA Personal passwords -stops at 32 chars. Mine is 33… I know it’s bit rot - old application starting to fail on new versions of the OS because I am able to set all 33 chars using Airport Utility on an Intel Mac running Catalina.

Ah well, the time had to come. Need to dive into mesh access points again.

Cheers. Liam

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I have always advised my friends in the Apple world to start moving away from the Apple Airports with drives. In 2016 apple was moving more to the cloud and they disbanded the internal team that developed the solution.

I doubt that Apple even tests anything released to the solution in their latest software offerings.

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@RonV42 Totally agree. That is the right advice. For me, as long as a bit of kit is still doing the job, and I can manage it without herculean efforts then I may choose to keep it. I only have one pre-Ventura mac in the house now, and that is slated for replacment so when it’s gone I know the time has come to replace the Airports. I could run an earlier Macos in a VM but that’s at the level I consider the effort is too high.

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