Airport base stations lock up under heavy load
 

I have had a lot of problems with my original Airport base station (the one with two ethernet ports). After about one to two days of running LimeWire the base station does lock up. It starts with traffic getting slower and slower until you are not even able to reach the base station using the admin program (it displays the dreaded spinning beach ball cursor while attempting to contact the base station). The only way to regain control of the base station was to power cycle it.

I initially thought I had a bad device and looked for a replacement. I did find another nice router from Netgear and never looked back.

But two days ago I accidently let my Mac log into my neighbours brand new Airport Extreme base station (freshly installed without any encryption!) and today coming back to my Mac I see that his Airport Extreme base station locked up like mine did.

My conclusion: if you want to use Gnutella with wireless networks stay away from Apple Airport base stations, use anything else on the market.

Well, now I have to go over and tell the neighbour of my deeds. Oh well. :-)

base station experience
 

I just discovered i maintain way more connections (50 instead of 5) and have way faster and more reliable downloads through ethernet instead of airport. I highly reccomend not attempting large downloads wirelessly. I also have had a few lockups and errors but mostly just dropped connections and slow downloads.

I also did try Ethernet, but I had the same lockups. I have to explain that the Airport base station I used was the one with two Ethernet ports, on that did do my DSL connection, one Ethernet port for the computers in my home office and wireless for my iBook. Even if I connect my iBook to Ethernet and then used the Internet through the Airport base station as DSL router it did lock up under heavy load.

Currently I am using a Netgear FWAG114 DSL router and dual band wireless access point and it does not lockup, it does not matter if I use LimeWire via the Ethernet or wireless, I have let LimeWire running for weeks and had no problems.