Unfortunately I’ve been out of town for the last two weeks due to the death of Emily’s father whom I’ve now known for the past six years. There have been many additional stresses tossed my way during this time, but the one that has affect others was that my AirPort Extreme (Gigabit) has been a bit flaky and requiring numerous reboots.
While it had been failing to route traffic after four or five days I could still remotely reset the AirPort Extreme, but not being totally with it (as you can imagine) I was failing to detect outages in a timely manner. On Wenesday, April 30th, I decided it’d be prudent to upgrade to the latest firmware in the hopes of gaining stability improvements.
However, after upgrading to AirPort Extreme firmware version 7.3.1, I could no longer ping my server. I chalked it up to a crash after the update, and fortunately was scheduled to be home that day (for only an evening) so was able to reboot it. But, I did not test from the outside world and I had not researched to latest firmware update before applying it. Doh!
Four days later (today), when I finally was back in town again, I took to troubleshooting the situation. I had full Internet access from inside my network (wired & wireless), but I couldn’t get any HTTP, SSH, or ICMP traffic to go through. I tried toggling many settings and eventually found that I could still hit HTTP through port 811. I was afraid that Comcast might be blocking ports again, but decided to fully test the port forwarding lead first.
I soon found that I could just port forward the most important ports and traffic flowed correctly. There was obviously a problem with the “Enable default host at” option in the 7.3.1 firmware. A quick Google search confirmed that others have run into this as well:
- Apple Support Discussions: Time Capsule 7.3.1 & ‘Enable Default Host’
- Accelerate Your Mac: Feedback on Airport Base 7.3.1 Firmware & Airport/Time Machine Update 1.0
So, hopefully this’ll be fixed in the next firmware release. In the meantime, I sincerely apologize for the four day downtime of UNNA (and this site, of course).
Note: I’ve filed a bug report for this issue with Apple (see rdar://problem/5955680) in the hopes of expediting the resolution of it.
Update: This issue has been resolved by firmware version 7.3.2.
1 A port forward I put in for backwards compatibility with links to my site from the days when port 80 was blocked by my ISP.
