Airport Express Wireless Ethernet Router

It would seem that I have inadvertently found a way to make Apple’s Airport Express‘ crash. And – it’s pretty easy. Simply setting them to Channel 11 causing them to fail intermittently, and normally the only way to recover them is by power cycling.

I have been trying to rework our network here because of some overlap and coverage issues from the 4 wireless access points. As such I was changing which adapters were on the non-overlapping wifi channels (1, 6 and 11).

In doing so – I made the two Airport Express’ channel 11, which seems to have been a big mistake. Almost immediatly after making the change, just having the Airport Utility open would show them disappearing, and then reappearing sometimes minutes later, sometimes hours.

I can only assume it’s a design fault with the boards, but – it’s a design fault that seems to have existed for some time. One Express is an original, the other was only purchased early this year.

I can’t even be bothered reporting it to Apple support, the Australian support line is… well, useless. If I thought for a second that they would actually lodge it as an issue – I would, but I know that it will be in one ear and out the other.