May 2014 – testequals

AirPort Utility 6.x “Flash on Activity”

The other day I updated the AirPort Extremes in my house, resetting them to their default settings. When I had everything up and running again, I noticed they no longer flashed with activity. I searched through the AirPort Utility 6.x (6.3.2) installed on Mavericks and could not find this setting. I searched DuckDuckGo and found a lot of other people longing for this option, too. Since you cannot install (can you?) AirPort Utility 5.x onto Mavericks, I ended up installing 5.x onto my Windows 7 VM. There I was able to find the setting, make the change, and was happy again.

But what if you don’t have a Windows VM? What if all you have is Mavericks? Well, I have an easy enough solution for you. In AirPort Utility 6.x, export your AirPort configuration file and save it to your desktop. Open this file with a text editor (such as Sublime or vim) and search for “leAC” (lower case L).

<key>leAC</key>
<integer>1</integer>

Change this to:

<key>leAC</key>
<integer>2</integer>

Save the file, go back into AirPort Utility 6.x and import this configuration file. Don’t change anything else in your file, just the 1 into a 2. This tells your AirPort that you’d like it to “Flash on Activity”. Let the AirPort restart and take note and the wonder that is a flashing green LED.

2014-10-06 Update

It seems this trick does not work on the latest Airport Extremes with 802.11ac. Even with the above set, the LED on the front of this device does not flash.

Linode So Far

I’ve been using Linode now for a few months, and I basically could not be more pleased with the service. Linode recently moved to newer and faster CPUs, as well as moving over to 100% SSDs. I never thought my Linode was slow before, but it certainly seems faster now. I’ve not run any benchmarks myself, but there are those that have, and the improvements are not small. It’s just been rock solid thus far.

I moved some old websites running Perl code over to the new Linode instance. To my surprise, I rediscovered that this code is about 10 years old. I’m amazed it still works. And that’s the beauty of my Linode, or more specifically, Debian running on my Linode. I simply installed Perl and a handful of perlmods, and the sites sprang back to life. I don’t ever remember Linux being this easy to use.

And so I have nothing but great things to say about Linode. While there have been a few outages I’m not pleased with, Linode posted regular status updates and was honest about what was happening. Otherwise, response times are down by 25% over the Mac mini server I moved from … and immensely faster for the sites I moved from DreamHost.

If you’re looking for a VPS, Linode should be your final stop!