How To Kill an AirPort Extreme Base Station
by
Dan Fairs
—
last modified
May 13, 2008 07:06 PM
Apple products aren't infallible, you know.
Here's how to kill a base station so badly that it needs power cycling:
- Create a few big Time Machine backups on a USB disk attached to your Mac.
- Unmount the backup and hang the drive off the back of your AirPort Extreme.
- Configure the AirPort Extreme to share the disk as an AirDisk
- Mount up the new AirDisk on your Mac. Note how you can browse the old backups. (They won't work as an AirDisk Time Machine backup though, those are sparse disk images.)
- In a terminal window, su to root and go to the Backups.backupdb directory.
- rm -rf <machinename>, to try to remove the old Time Machine backup.
- Boom!
At this point, my Mac gets disconnected from the wireless network. A subsequent attempt to reconnect times out, and the base station then disappears completely. Yanking the power cord is the only way to fix it.
Don't do this to other peoples' base stations, it's mean.
(Hm - wonder if it's accessible if I attach via Ethernet? Might have to give that a go, in the spirit of inquiry...)
