Dumb Decisions 101

My fun and games with the new pre-n router from Apple.While I’m far from an Apple zealot, I have to admit that over the past 8 months I’ve swayed towards the mac camp in a big way. The beautiful simplicity of the BSD-rooted OSX, coupled with the switch to Intels latest and greatest ‘Core Duo’ dual core processors makes for a very impressive experience, especially when coupled with apps such as Quicksilver, Newsfire, Delicious Library and Yojimbo, to name but a few.Following on from the problems we’ve experienced with our now ancient Linksys WRT54G (v1.1), coupled with my desire to experiment with Airport Disk/Airtunes, I recently invested in the *new* Airport Extreme 802.11n router/access point.Between my previous life as an IT journo and current job I’ve used a lot of routers, most without ever needing to touch the documentation, after all there’s only a finite amount of ways to lay out the same settings… That is of course providing the manufacturer includes them - you would expect the basic stuff like IP settings and such, whereas options such as uPnP aren’t quite as prevalent.So when I set up the Airport I was amazed to find that while operating as a router, the IP taken by the airport is fixed, something which when I queried on discussions.apple.com a kind Apple support representative suggested needed to be logged as an enhancement request - am I the only person who thinks this is complete madness?Maybe our home isn’t typical, we have a number of network connected devices including a Windows Server 2003 DC, a Wii, an XBox 360, the Netgear SPH200D Skype/DECT Phone, a PSP, two Nintendo DS, a Windows Media Centre, a couple of PC’s and a couple of macs. Having to reconfigure the server off its original address, reconfigure DNS and DHCP (which run from it) and then reconfigure any device which was given a static address to find the new DNS server and gateway was something I could have done without.This is a basic option and one which has been available in every router I have *ever* used (30+ off the top of my head), I can’t see any logical reason to omit such an important feature, especially when you consider the “Connected Home” image a lot of these companies are promoting. I’ve considered manually amending the config files to attempt to override this, but the prospects of a £130 paperweight for my efforts has thus far dissuaded me.Bad Apple! Bad!