Airport error 
I’ve been using my Drobo and several Western Digital hard drives plugged into my Airport Extreme for well over a year trouble-free. Since upgrading to Snow Leopard the connectivity is horribly unstable. Seems that the Finder drops connection to the Airport shared drives after about a minute or so. Also, the drives are not showing up as shared under Back to My Mac anymore. This is completely unacceptable!
Everything continues to work fine under 10.5 on a different computer, so it is most definitely related to 10.6.
Anyone else having these problems or is it just me?
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
its not only you..i’ve been having dropped connection on my wireless ever since i upgraded to snow leopard. my mac thats still using leopard work fine with no dropped connections. hope apple fixes this issue
I changed the firmware on the airport back to 7.4.1 which seems to have fixed my back-to-my-mac issues, but now Snow Leopard can’t connect to the shared drives at all. I’m now getting the most bizarre error– ‘The alias “Drobo” can’t be opened because the original item can’t be found.’
Guess there’s no cure until Apple fixes whatever is wrong in Snow Leopard.
Another step in resolving the problem. Apparently there’s something wrong with using afp on Snow Leopard with the Drobo. I switched over to manually mapping the drives using smb and everything maintains connection properly. This should provide a temporary workaround until Apple repairs whatever is wrong with afp.
I’m having a similar issue using a seagate HD connected to my airport extreme.
How did you do the manual mapping?
In Finder, head to the Go menu >> Connect to Server. The address should look something like the following:
smb://AirportName.local./DriveName
So, for me my Airport is named “Jamison’s ApEx” and my drive volume is named “Drobo”. My address is:
smb://Jamisons-ApEx.local./Drobo
(drop apostrophes and replace spaces with hyphens)
Give that a try and let me know if it solves your issues as it has for me
I wasn’t able to copy big files (4gb folder). The connection dropped at about 20%.
Tried your approach, it worked fine yesterday… then today it couldn’t find my Hard Drive again.
I turned it off and back on, did a “disconnect all” on airport utility and it’s back up and running.
Thanks!
It seems that finder has some problems with afp… SL is a great update, too bad apple didn’t get this right yet.
I agree, since upgrading the airport which usually rules my house now sounds like a bad radio signal, dropping off every five minutes speaker to speaker
please apple-fix this as I can’t party with the tunes dying like they do..
Update 11/10/2009:
I was hoping 10.6.2 would fix these issues as one of the patches is listed as:
Network file systems fixes provided for:
compatibility with third-party AFP servers
see:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3874
But sadly after testing the connection to my airport-shared drives, the weird alias issues persist. I shall continue to use an smb mapping for all my drives.
I had the same issue as i had Linksys WAP54G wireless access point and have two laptops and two Mac’s one Mac book that runs Leopard and the second Mac boo pro that runs Snow Leopard.
All worked fine with my wireless access point for years and now soon as o upgrade to (10.6) it kept giving me “connection failed” and i reconfigured my router and upgraded the firmware and it still did me know good.
I spent a good two hours on the phone with Linksys and Apple. Linksys said it was my router and Apple told me it was my network. I was furious because how could it be my network when everything else is connecting fine and Snow Leopard did see my network with a good signal but just would not connect.
Finally Apple agreed that this is a compatibility issue on there end.
I went out and spent $250.00 on the newest Cisco/Linksys gigabit wireless (N) Simultaneous Dual-Band router and all works like a charm and purchased a 2 TB NAS which maps and connects fine.
Bottom line: Apple needs to make sure that Snow Leopard is compatible with any wireless router weather it is Linksys or their own Airport product as i should not have had to spend anymore money just to make Apples latest OS work with my network as it should just work!
I’ve been having the same problem with my new white Macbook. All my other devices (2 PC’s and iPhone) successfully connect to the Linksys WAP54G, and all of them including the Macbook connect just fine to my Linksys WRT54G-ST. I got the WAP54G about 4 months ago and am not happy that I have to replace it so soon just to get 1 brand spanking new machine with a design defect to connect.
I have been having the exact same problem! What a disappointment… you spend all this cash on apple gear, you pay to upgrade your OS, only for it to screw up on you! ARG!