I haven’t ranted about Apple here for some months, but the time is ripe.
In February I ran a software update on my Mac Book and it downloaded and installed a lot of software. Included in that was Apple Airport Extreme Update 2007-001. After installing this update the Mac Book could no longer connect to my wireless network. It couldn’t even see my wireless network. Which is obviously sub-optimal behaviour for a wireless software update.
After a bit of Googling I found that I wasn’t the only person with that problem. And I found that the only way to fix the problem was to back-out the update. But that’s not the easiest of tasks. Apple don’t seem to expect that their updates will break things, so they don’t give you an easy way to roll back a change. I had to download the OSX 10.4.9 distribution from the web, extract the required files and replace the updated versions with the older versions.
Sounds simple, but it was a bit of a hassle working out exactly which files I needed to replace. It was quite a relief when I finally rebooted the computer and saw the wireless icon come to life again.
Then yesterday, Apple released another airport update – Airport Extreme Update 2007-002. Once again I trusted Apple and installed it. And once again it broke wireless networking.
Of course I hadn’t saved the details of what I had changed last time. But this time I knew vaguely what I was looking for so it only took about half as long to fix it. Still bloody annoying though.
It’s astonishing to me that Apple can release wireless software that is as broken as this. Twice.
I’ll be very suspicious of Apple wireless updates in the future, but on the assumption that they’ll catch me out again I’m making a note of here of what I need to do. The required files are here and they need to be put into /System/Library/Extensions. Oh… and it’s important that they are owned by root.