Apple’s new Airport Extremes, announced a few days ago, have several features that make them very useful for small business environments.

Foremost is the guest network. As well as your main Wireless LAN, you can set up a secondary wLAN which can be restricted to internet access only – preventing access to your internal network. the Airport Extreme can be configured to allow devices on this guest network to communicate with each other, if you wish.

Security options are interesting here – none, WPA or WPA/WPA2. This is because the 802.11n spec does not allow WEP security.

The new Airport Extreme also has two radios built in – one operating on the 5Ghz band and one on the 2.4Ghz. This allows useful network traffic separation – 802.11n-only on 5Gz for all new network equipment, and 802.11n/g/b on 2.4Ghz for older equipment. Each frequency can have a separate SSID – useful in some circumstances, but will break the seamless roaming Apple brought out in the Airport update earlier this week.

As before, holding down Option when selecting radio mode gives full access to the radio choices. However, the defaults of 802.11/a/n and 802.11b/g seem perfectly reasonable.

In summary, this device is useful for separating out older devices onto their own network, allowing newer computers with 5Gz-capable network adapters their own clear space without the need for two wireless access points.

However, if you still need WEP access for old devices on the 2.4Ghz side, then you will still need a second access point. If that’s the case, and you already have one on 5Ghz and one on 2.4GHz, then there’s nothing really to recommend rushing out and buying a new Airport Extreme just yet.

Their final new feature is MobileMe integration. If you have a MobileMe account, USB hard drives attached to the access point are shared via the Back to My Mac. Useful for getting access to data from wherever you are – if you can get Back to My Mac working properly. I never have!

Posted: March 6th, 2009 under Comment, Review.
Comments: none

Head-to-Head: Parallels Desktop for Mac vs. VMware Fusion:

In the majority of overall averages of our tests, Parallels Desktop is the clear winner running 14-20% faster than VMware Fusion. The one exception is for those that need to run Windows XP, 32-bit on 2 virtual processors, VMware Fusion runs about 10% faster than Parallels Desktop.

My question is, do users notice 14-20% in real life use? My guess is that they don’t.

(Via MacTech.com.)

Posted: March 6th, 2009 under Comment, Review.
Comments: none

Here at Corpmac we’re fans of virtualisation – both Parallels in particular is in pretty much daily use. However, there are times where nothing other than Boot Camp will do the trick – so we also have a slice of hard disk dedicated to a Boot Camp partition.

Trouble is, its size was a bit of a guess. And, it turns out, quite a bit too large. Getting that wasted disk space back to the main Mac partition isn’t something that can be done with Boot Camp Assistant – well, not unless you want to do a complete backup / resize / restore. Not a pleasant task.

So, we’re glad to find out about CampTune from Paragon Software. This is a bootable CD that enables you to safely resize partitions, automatically dealing with any data that needs moved to cope with the resizing.

We’ve given this a work-out here – eventually settling on reclaiming the 7Gb we had over-allocated to out Boot Camp partition. CampTune performed perfectly each time, taking around an hour to move data and resize the partitions. The only small niggle we’d have is that once it’s finished, and you press OK, it just leaves you sitting at a final screen. All you need to do (and indeed can do) at this point is reboot, but it’d be good to have at least a message on screen telling you to do this.

So definitely recommended if you want to resize your Boot Camp partition. CampTune does exactly that with no fuss or drama.

CampTune is in pre-release at the moment, and is currently available for free.

Technorati Tags:
CampTune, partition, Boot Camp

Posted: August 10th, 2008 under Review, Stuff We Use.
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I’ve been using the iPhone properly now for 72 hours, and the my first impressions have set in. And while there is a lot of good about the phone, there are definite imperfections. Here are the top three:

It’s slow. Actions that took an imperceptible time before, such as selecting somewhere else in the Contacts list, or going to the SMS screen, now have a perceptible delay. This is going to irritate me more and more.

It’s buggy. I’ve had the location services freeze, requiring me to reboot the phone to get it working. I never needed to reboot my last one.

Battery life is terrible When out and about in the city centre last night, with moderate iPhone use over both Wifi and 3G, the battery got down to 20% from a full charge over five hours. That’s really not good.

For the moment, applications and flexibility are winning out – I do still like it. However my opinions may have changed after a few months’ use.

Posted: July 14th, 2008 under Review.
Comments: 1

I’ve had one spam today. That’s a 99.5% reduction. I’m impressed. The system is a pretty serious pain in the neck to set up for small users: once you understand their model then it’s fine, but it’s not one for unsophisticated admins to set up.

A full review will appear later, but if the per-user costs of Google Apps Message Security Services gives you cause for concern, Mail-scanning.com, a uk-based service propose to charge by the domain. Their prices are not yet fixed (as they’re in free beta) but they are looking to charge around £10 or less per domain per year. That’s good value.

Technorati Tags:
antispam, antivirus, google, postini, mail-scanning

Posted: February 7th, 2008 under News, Review, Stuff We Use.
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The thing I like most about SuperDuper from Shirt Pocket Software is that it just works. That’s the reason for the 3.5 month delay between Leopard’s release and the release of the new version yesterday – the guys wanted to be absolutely certain that it continued to do so. And it definitely does.

The way it’s most used here is to make full images of machines’ system drives, updated nightly. This way, if an internal hard drive fails (our Macbook Pros have been pretty heavily thrown about when travelling in the past, and we have had drive failures) all we need to do is get a new drive, install it, then restore directly from the SuperDuper drive. Best of all, we can continue to use the machine – albeit slowly – booted off the external drive.

We’ve been trying that today, and are pleased to report that it all works perfectly for us. There was only one small problem – SuperDuper uses a series of scripts to exclude certain files from the backup. We extended that with our own script, to exclude other thing we didn’t care whether they were backed up or not. One script has vanished – the “Exclude Spotlight Search Index” script – and this caused our backups to fail to start until we modified them to remove this script. After that it’s been fine.

We’re breathing a sigh of relief here. We have our bootable backups back. While we don’t mistreat our machines, accidents can and do happen. Now the process of recovering from such an accident is simple again.

SuperDuper 3.5 is a free upgrade for existing users, and $27.95 to unlock full functionality for new users. Feature-limited demos are free.

Technorati Tags:
SuperDuper, review

Posted: February 6th, 2008 under Review, Stuff We Use.
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