I wanted to upgrade my home wireless network to “N” for all the obvious reasons. My Macbook Pro came equipped with N and I just could not stand being throttled to G speed while knowing something six times faster was available. Like always, looking for instant gratification I went to BestBuy and picked out their best N router, the Linksys WRT600N. It is Linksys’s best offering and offered dual-band radios (2.4 & 5 GHz) plus a USB connection for attaching storage allowing it to function as a NAS (Network Attached Storage) and FTP server. I studied the specs carefully and made sure it would work with all my existing wireless PCs and my Mac. Linksys’s box propaganda clearly states the WRT600N is Windows and Macintosh compatible.
Connecting and configuring the router was a snap. I’d used many Linksys products in the past so I felt right at home with the setup. As always, I avoided the “monkeyware” (that’s the setup utility that comes with most consumer-grade network products making their setup so easy a monkey can do it) and went straight to the web server interface built into the router. In less than ten minutes the WRT600N was up and running, controlling all the wireless connections in my home and routing internet traffic to my cable modem. So far so good, right? Enter Mr. Murphy. The feature that sold me on the Linksys product over the other offerings was its storage capability. Having a NAS is a very handy way to keep shared data available to everyone and a really slick way to keep things backed up and always available, even when every other computer in the house is turned off. Living up to its reputation, the “Storage Link” (Linksys’s name for this capability) setup was as easy as the router’s. I attached a WD 500 GB “My Book” USB drive to the router’s USB port, clicked on the appropriate tab on the router’s setup utility and presto! Every computer in the house could see and connect to the drive. First I tested my main PC by mapping a network drive to the NAS and configuring a small backup to run immediately. No problem. The story was the same for the two other PCs and at this point I was feeling quite satisfied with Linksys and myself. The sky began turning dark when I booted up my Mac. When I opened Finder, I saw the router in the sidebar, navigated to the folder I wanted and provided the login I had configured. A snap. I’m still feeling good. I started writing this blog in Word like always when I was interrupted by the doorbell. I clicked “Save”, selected the NAS, named the file and saved it. It worked like a charm.
After dusting-off the salesman at the front door I decided to point my Mac backup (the regular one, not Time Machine) to the NAS like I’d done for the PCs. That’s when things went south. My backup failed with an error message stating I didn’t have sufficient privileges to write files to the NAS. Hummmmm… I right-clicked the NAS folder in Finder and selected “Get Info..”. It said I had read and write permission. Next I surfed to the NAS setup and double-checked the user account I was using. It was OK too! Just to be sure, I disconnected from the NAS and reconnected using the admin account. No luck. I could see everything, copy files from the NAS to my desktop or elsewhere, but couldn’t drag, copy or paste a file to the NAS from Finder. Every time I tried I got the same error, “…insufficient privileges…”. I decided to try copying files using Cyberduck, my FTP utility of choice. It worked just fine no matter what credentials I used to log in. This was getting weird, and beginning to look more and more like a Linksys problem. After trying everything I could think of including reformatting the NAS drive, deleting and re-creating all the user accounts on the router and even resetting the router to factory defaults and completely starting from scratch, the problem persisted. I was completely out of ideas so I started searching forums for clues. It seems this problem happened to other Mac users on a similar Linksys product, the WRT350N. The same box as mine without the 5GHz band radio. The sad part, no solution. The thread just ended with users bitching and crying.
With nowhere left to turn I went to linksys.com and got on-line with a tech using their support chat. After the usual thirty or forty minutes of problem description and answering all the obvious troubleshooting questions like “Are you logged in as an administrator?“, the poor support girl in Bangla-desh or wherever the hell she was agreed I needed to elevate the support incident on their web site and wait for a level-two phone call from their support team. I obliged and figured I’d never hear from Linksys again.
My cell phone rang the next morning at the precise time I ‘d requested on Linksys’s support site and I was very pleased to hear a Cisco engineer on the other end. We spent the next twenty minutes reviewing everything I’d done so far, which OS X version I was using and him asking me to try a couple of different methods of connecting to the router, both of which did no good. We ended the call with him agreeing to seek additional engineering help and promising to call me back when he had more information. I felt certain this was the end and I’d never hear from Cisco again. I’m such a pessimist.
An hour later the same engineer called me back! This time there was a second engineer on the line. After introductions, the second engineer asked a couple of pointed questions about my Mac user account and the router firmware. I answered, and to my surprise he said he was able to reproduce the exact problem in their lab. You could have knocked me over with a feather! These guys were actually working on my problem! Additionally, they both spoke to me like the engineer that I am, not some ignorant teenager who can’t get to his WoW server. We had a succinct, thoughtful discussion about the possible causes, concluding with their admission to something being amiss with the WRT600N’s firmware. I felt vindicated and very pleased with the absolute professionalism displayed by both engineers, even though we hadn’t solved my problem. After this experience, I have every reason to believe Cisco will get this fixed and everyone owning a Linksys router with Storage Link will have a firmware revision soon.
I attribute this entire incident to the “early adopter” syndrome, even though I’m not early to adopt a Linksys router or a Macbook. I do, however, feel fairly confident I’m early to adopt the combination. If this problem had surfaced on Windows machines, the routers wouldn’t have gotten past QC and likely wouldn’t have shipped until the firmware was fixed. I can’t wait to hear what Cisco will do next, but I have a feeling I’ll be one of the first to know.
admin Apple Minutia, OS X Apple, Cisco, Linksys, MacNoob, router, wireless N
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