Apple AirPort4.2

So what's the bottom line? Incompatible with PPOE and DSL? Is this an upgrade to be skipped? Yes? No? Maybe? On just about every one of these Apple upgraders, someone or more than one macker posts negative comments. Some qualify what they post, some just post that "it sucks and crashes." These "it sucks, crashes, and destroyed my directory" etc. postings are taken seriously enough that I, for one, will skip the upgrade and wait on the the next. Then the next upgrader comes along and what's the first comment? "It sucks, crashes, and destroys everything." Were there no beta testers? Granted, it's useless to ask anyone from Apple. To those heros out there who sacrifice their macs to determine that an upgrader "sucks, crashes, and erases everything", how about going to System Profiler and post everything you have on your Mac prior to performing the catastrophic upgrade. Maybe you forgot to unplug all the firewire cables, maybe you have some bizzare PCI card, maybe you're running SCSI. If a particular upgrader is going to hose every mackers directory, at least post how you configured your Mac so we'll know which Macs will be affected. Or, maybe you're 100% right and it crashes every newly bought unmodified Mac! One more small request - then tell us why Apple's beta testers didn't do their jobs. Am I asking too much? Look. We're Mac users, not Pee Cee users, just run Apple System Profiler before posting catastrophic comments that must be taken seriously. Negative comments must be taken seriously, at least show the courtesy of describing the circumstances in as much detail as there is. Thank you, fellow mackers.

i have a powerbook and the AP extreme/express in wpa mode. the ibook of my girlfriend is not able to connect to the wpa2 encryption after the update to 10.4.2 and the 4.2 firmware update. all other hardware works fine, only the ibook g3 900mhz with old airport card bitches...

connection is stable with my newer pb 1.33ghz. . older pb 1ghz has connection problems with the ppoe. I have to go into network diagnostics numerous times for it to recognize the connection even though my other powerbook is sitting next to it, online, Overall signal strenght is down also- very depressing- i shouldn't have "updated"

Warning! Breaks PPPOE between Airport and ADSL modem. No way to get around it. I'm using a big german ADSL provider and many others report the same problem.

Same problem as reported by many others. PPoE stops working if you install this update on a Airport Extreme. I am using it with DSL in Beijing but have read similar reports from people in Singapore so looks like a bug here. Successfully downgraded to 5.5.1 and everything works great. Use my Extreme together with an Airport Express and WDS. The Airport Express works well as remote station in WDS so problem seems to be only int the PPoE part.

Airport 4.2 updates the base station software to 5.6. As soon as I uploaded this to my base station - it stopped communicating with my PPPoE connection. The only way I was able to restore internet was to use my wife's PB which had not been updated to Airport 4.2 and using the Airport Admin utility, I uploaded 'default' software to my base station (which took it to 5.5.1) Now it works. So, at least on my system, Airport 4.2 installs v5.6 of the base station software which does not communicate with my PPPoE connection.

Hmm this is interesting.. Apparently, upon updating my airport, my signal strength (according to the very useful AP Grapher) went from a typical 30-40% to 0-10%. Somehow, I still have internet and get 2 bars in the signal strength indicator. Something's screwed up. My airport worked perfectly about three versions ago, and each successive "update" has only taken another wack at my connection strength. What to these people do when they update the software???

Seems to have boosted my Airport reception, good job Apple!

No problems here. Also corrected an issue with airport admin not finding my airport express while it was conencted to the internet

If you live in France and use 9 telecom don't use 4.2....

Works great, but remember if you switch from WPA to WPA2, you'll most likely have to restart your Airport and reboot your computer. My AEBS station dropped out completely until doing so. Word of caution. After that, everything works fine. You'll need to install, then run the Airport Admin Utility, and it will prompt you to update the firmware. Then you can change security to WPA2 if you like. Restart and reboot, all should be good.

Finally! And bloody how! Life with my AE is bit better now.

Just installed this. It updated the Airport Admin utility, which then updates the base station (an express in my case) to 6.2 when you select "Configure" from the menu for that base station. Everything seems to be running just fine, and perhaps it is connecting to the Net just a bit faster now, but I can't be sure... SirROM