“‘My AirPort’s light is orange instead of green. What do I do?'” Melissa Holt writes for The Mac Observer. “I’ll take ‘questions I get a lot’ for $1000, Alex.”
“I’d like to point out right from the beginning that I am in no way disparaging Apple’s network equipment here. I’ve been using their stuff myself since approximately the dawn of time,” Holt writes. “But if you’re managing a network for someone else, AirPort Utility’s habit of blinking devices’ status lights amber when updates are available is…kind of a pain.”
“Because even if the users you’re working with are fine with doing their own installations, some of them might not know how to troubleshoot any issues that come up,” Holt writes. “However, there are a couple of preferences you can change to be sure that your users aren’t notified of updates, so you can decide to go forward with new software when you’re ready (and not just when AirPort Utility wants you to!).”
Simple instructions in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s nothing like an “all green” Airport Utility!
I also recommend running a wifi diagnostic to see if any channels are congested, and utilizing a 5 GHz only channel for better and more consistent performance.
5Ghz just doesn’t get through walls and obstacles as well as the 2.4ghz, so we never relied solely on it unless it was a very small space.
Sold my Time Capsule, 5Ghz kept dropping despite all my efforts.
Bought a 2TB WD My Cloud instead and hooked it up to my Virgin Media SuperHub 2 – infinitely better performance and able o access everything from anywhere.
Get an EERO.
Done.
I use an Apple TimeCapsule for its integration with TimeMachine. But I tell you I have no love for this thing. Several years ago, Apple dumbed down the software rather than adding more options. They even made the utility unable to control older versions of Apple Airport, which I had been using to extend my network to my garage and yard. Yes, they were on an antiquainted G network, but that was okay for my infrequent use. Lately, though a bigger problem has arisen with its seeming inability to be able to reliably make backups. I keep getting messages from two different computers that they have to make a new Time Machine backup up. This of course takes a long time. And I don’t like the idea of not having a functional backup because the device I use to do that lost it’s marbles. So I bought a new Time Machine about a year ago, but the problem is back now. Apple has serious software quality issues. And I don’t think they have anyone working on networking anymore or they’d have improved the product over time, like building in VPN support, which they have not.