Seriously Apple?

Last week my wife was complaining that the Apple TV had problems streaming her videos over Airplay. Eventually it turned out that the Airport Express (2012) was not working anymore. I used it to extend the wireless network because my Airport Extreme cannot reach the living room. The only problem was that I had no clue why it suddenly stopped nor did anything in the Airport Utility indicate any problems except that it stated it could not extend the network.

After a long googling session I seemed that the Airport Utility 6 had one flag missing – the one to allow to extend the network. Even if that is true I still have no idea why this stopped now because I upgraded to Airport utility 6 a while back. I also read that the only way to fix it is to install Airport Utility 5.6 but that is only available for Lion and I am running on Mountain Lion. A downgrade failed and so I was nearly giving up.

Eventually I found an Automator script that would allow me to install 5.6 by extracting it manually. On my MacBook Air it failed because on that machine the default extraction tool in not the Archive Utility but BetterZip. Copying the entire stuff over to another box and voile it worked. Then I only had to make a small change and update the Base Station (Airport Extreme) and voila everything worked again.

Looking at the post inside the Apple Community about this issue this seems to be quite old (September 22nd 2012). So, I am wondering what the heck Apple is doing. Why can this flag not be added to Airport Utility and if not why is Airport Utility 6 suddenly make extending the network fail.

So much for “it just works” – Apple