The Chicken Coop

So, I finally caved to the pressure (my own pressure, that is, not anyone elses) and went out and got a Time Capsule for storage and backup at home. Overall, I’m really rather impressed with it.

For those who don’t know (all 1 of you), it’s basicly an Airport Extreme (which is a fairly well-spec’ed wireless router) with a built-in 500GB (or 1TB) disk. The disk is ment to be used with Time Machine, on Leopard, but it can be used as a normal disk if you want to. I’m not sure if you can use it as both a disk AND a Time Machine backup device, but seriously – it’d be a major design flaw if you can’t.

So I spent a little time on Sunday afternoon setting the new network up. It now looks something like the diagram below:

(yes, it’s quicker for me to draw on paper and scan than use Visio or even OmniGraffle)

We have our broadband thru BT. It’s not perfect – far from it – but it works, and I’m on a 12 month contract, so they’ll be there until November or so. They provide a nice little hub thing, which is a combo WiFi, VOIP, landline, etc, all in a trivial-to-configure, and secure-out-of-the-box unit. It would be even better if the bandwidth didn’t drop to 1meg at 7pm (to the second), and if it didn’t crash (ie, reboot) when we try to watch stuff on iplayer. But I digress….

So, once I got the TC home and plugged in, it was time to fire up the Airport utility (which mac’s come with), install the 802.11n patch for the macbook (tho I think Leopard has it pre-installed?), and it was up and running. I was expecting to have all sorts of problems, but it just went easily into bridge mode (ie, turn off it’s firewall and DHCP server), and sat there as a nice disk-plus-fast-wide-network thinggie. Could have been easier, but not a lot easier.

I was expecting to have to have two networks – one for the TC, which would be NAT’ed thru it’s WAN port to the BT Homehub. In bridge mode, it’s all one big network, which means I can see the Airport Express without a problem. Lovely – no double-NAT to get to the internet, which BitTorrent hates. Plus, the laptops are not on the BTHH’s wifi, which may make it more table. I hope.

As you can see above, I’ve setup two seperate WIFI networks. Both of the mac’s support 802.11n, but the Airport Express doesn’t (it’s an older one), and neither does my phone, so I need 802.11g. Luckely, the TC supports using only 5Ghz, not 2.4, so I have it locked onto that, and the BT Homehub locked onto “g”, and none of them collide at all.

The performance of the N network is rather good, tho I’ve so far only tested it using SuperDuper of my disk, and tar (the unix command) to backup the ipod, so this may not be totally accurate. I can get around 3Meg/sec (thats megaBYTES, not megaBITS) sustained transfer rate between my laptop and the TC, and if I use the (in theory) gigabit ethernet connection (the macbook as GB ether, too), I get around 6Meg/sec sustained. Not bad for wireless, I must say, tho I think the bottleneck is either the USB connection (for the ipod tar backup), or the TC’s disk (for the SuperDuper backup), so I’m going to give it a go sometime with just a straight-up file copy. Either way, for what we are using it for (a backup and storage device), it’s definitly fast enough. The only thing I’ve noticed is this: I can backup at 3meg, and so can Leonie. At the same speed, at the same time. With G, you get 54meg of shared bandwidth. With the TC, I can get that PER node. It may slow down if you have more than two or three devices, but we dont, so it’s not an issue. Maybe it also has something to do with only having one 5Ghz device in the ‘hood, so not as many clashes as the 10+ 2.4Ghz wifi networks I can see.

So, all up it’s a nice solution, and a great replacement for the old server.

Update: I tried just copying a file over both the wifi and the gig-ethernet. The wifi peaks at about 15Meg/sec, and can sustain about 11, where as the gig-E can get about 30. I guess superduper isn’t the most efficient test of speed.