Problem with Airport Extreme Base Station

May 13, 2004

I just posted over on Apple's boards but the theme seems to be constant. There is a problem with the Airport Extreme Base Station and version 5.4 of the Firmware. The problem manifests itself as the Base Station loosing its internet connection every 24 hours. The problem lies in having the base station setup to use the network time protocols for syncing its clock. The clock on the base station really doesn't matter unless you want the dates to show up correctly in logs (and you have remote logging turned on) so there are probably only a handful of people who will encounter this problem. The workaround is to have the base station not report in the correct time and to set the log file to "mark" the log instead.

below is an excerpt of the log file. The times by the way are UTC, not the local time zone, so people will see the problem occurring at different times ranging from about 8am to Noon in the continental US. Read more about Problem with Airport Extreme Base Station

Westlaw does RSS

May 7, 2004

Dave Winer points to a note from LawLibTech that Westlaw now supports RSS. I tried it and it works well. The StorageTek feed in the news feeds section is a WestLaw feed.

The good news doesn't stop there though, WestLaw has setup the system so that it readily accommodates feeds for places such as intranets where things can be linked using the firms subscription instead of each user having to log in each time. Very cool. Now I need to get better at using WestLaw.

Wireless blues

April 30, 2004

Glenn Fleishman has a good article about wireless networking in PC World. In the article he suggests how to boost your network's reliability and tells why many problems occur.

It should not be a surprise that an article in PC World is largely focused on PCs and it does spend a great deal of time on the woes of setting up wireless networking on Windows. However it does have good tips and some ideas for users of other platforms as well.

This article follows on several days of wireless problems for one of my clients. Their connection with their Charter Pipeline cable modem has been pretty rock solid since December. For the period between December and April 21 they always had the same IP and things worked swimmingly. Just as they left on a trip the trouble started. Upon their return on April 27 a new address was assigned. On the 28th the connection was dropped again but with a reset of the modem they again got the new address. All of these had been in the same subnet. Then yesterday at about noon Pacific, the network changed to a different Class A network. No longer is it a 66.215 but its now a 24.205 Read more about Wireless blues

StorageTek continues spiral

April 28, 2004

StorageTek is unleashing trapped profitability once again. What that means for employees is that they will be without jobs. It's a simple methodology that has been practiced for several years by the ex-Xerox Mafia at StorageTek. When times are tough cut your way to profitability. Maybe someday the realization that there isn't any fat left and that having already cut any scraps of meat off the bone that sawing, grinding feeling is cutting through the bones. There are many great people who are, or once were at what was Read more about StorageTek continues spiral

Mailing List Solutions

April 20, 2004

What are the best mailing list solutions people are using today? We are in need of a better list management solution. In my mind the basic requirements include:

Web based administration including Add/Delete/Suspend
Web based archive
Ability to use the web to change from regular to digest delivery
Automatic processing of bounces

What are the best solutions to date for hosting this in-house?

Google's Cinderella Story

April 13, 2004

NPR has a good article this morning on search engines. The story is the second in a series about search engines and the business of searching on the net. Today's installment is Search Engine Wars.

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