Hi all, Karn main tech @ WebKarnage here.

This is a typical story of hardware frustration where you try and save a bit of cost, and end up with no result and a huge time cost to go with it!

The problem to be solved:- Easy wireless Time Machine backup for all users in the house so no-one can forget to do it.

The secondary aim:- Spend less than buying the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station & the HD, or a Time Capsule.

This doesn't sound too difficult does it? The hard drive cost will be the same, I just need to beat the cost of the Airport Extreme B.S. of around £130. I find a great deal on a Netgear DGN 2000 802.11n Wireless Router, now I just need a little unit to make the USB HD (in this case a 1TB Toshiba drive) 'talk' to the ethernet port of the router.

At this stage, everything still looks good, but looks can be deceiving. I find a Belkin F5L009 Network 5-Port USB2.0 Hub which looks the part, and between that and the Netgear router, I've only spent just over £110! That's not too bad is it? Now, all we have to do is get it all working.....

I have set up many Netgear routers with little trouble, and this proved to be the same. The networking was a little quicker than the previous g+ (108Mbps) unit, with a stronger signal reaching certain areas of the house too. Brilliant! Another step completed. Using the same network name and password as before, and copying the mac addresses across, means everything connects without a hitch.

Now, on to the Belkin Network Hub. Here is where the 'fun' lies. I connect the Toshiba 1TB HD to it, load the software for the Network Hub and connect to the disk. The icon wasn't coming up at first, so I double-clicked the HD in the app, to see it connect then disconnect in a flash, leaving me unable to re-connect without a re-start! Oh well, let's not do that again for now and move on. There is software on the disk, which I decide to copy to the Mac for now (only later to realise it's nearly all MacAffee Antivirus for the PC and delete 98% of it) so I can re-format the drive to HFS+. I thought I'd test it, and try and format the drive whilst connected through the network. After a little time, the connection to the HD was dropped, and I couldn't re-connect. Sod it I thought, so I connected the HD directly to the Mac and sort the formatting. I also downloaded the latest software I could find on belkin.com and installed that.

Reconnected through the network, I tried copying some files to the disk. 60MB or so into it, the connection to the HD was lost, re-made quickly, leaving the system looking at 2 copies, neither of which I could eject, so I had to force the Mac shutdown with the power button in the end. Changing drive didn't help any either. Wonderous!! Several full system lockups later (hadn't had any of those for a good long while) I was considering if it would make an attractive door retainer....

While tweeting my evident frustration, @Belkin asked if they could help. My details were passed on (with system and issue details ie. drops connection to HFS+ drives) and I would apparently get contact Friday. Late Friday, I had contact from the head of Customer Support for Europe, just to ask where I was, I replied in 10 mins, and that was it until Monday. Obviously that was an easy way to move me from the list until after the weekend! I then get another email, merely asking for my telephone number. I supply that, and then wait while the week disappears.

Friday I finally get a call in the short period while I have to turn the phone off during work in an audio studio!! Geez! I go through the usual automated nonsense at lunchtime trying to call back, and then eventually speak to Paul (nice enough chap) and tell him exactly what was in the original email sent to Belkin about 9 days before, that he had been forwarded. Sound efficient to you? No, it doesn't to me either. He then tells me his team for Belkin in Europe have produced a newer driver a month or 2 ago, and he would send me a link to it. Would that have been tricky to do last Friday? No, not in the least. Well, that was a lot of wasted time for both him and me.

So, I download the new software, and I can immediately transfer much larger files to the drive without a hitch. Ahhh! Much better!. Now for the 'acid test'. I decide to get Time Machine going. I haven't backed up for a few days, and set it off. It takes a very long while to prepare, then starts transferring 4GB of files. I feel we're on the right track, and tweet the happy news, and even send a message to Paul saying the driver appears to work on Mac OSX 10.5.7. I periodically check on the progress, and wander off at a point where it has got well past the 3GB point. Suddenly as I start to answer a forum question, the connection to the drive is lost, Time Machine crashes and I get the official message to hold the power button down to turn off the computer! Boy did I get happy too soon!

Re-booting, I decide it got a long way, and I'd try to do this again. After 40 mins of 'preparing' Time Machine decides to try and backup the remaining 572MB of files. This process is also running the MacBook hot and the fans are going like crazy, even though it is transferring files so much slower than normal!! I am now looking at it failing to go past 1.6MB, but as Time Machine doesn't tell me which file it doesn't like, I'm gonna have to connect directly again to finish the job.

This is a seriously inefficient app you are forced to run to 'talk' to this Belkin unit, and it doesn't cope well with large data volumes either. I have now wasted over 6 hours messing with this unit, and that equates to about £3GBP/hour for my time and it's not finished yet. The connection just isn't solid enough, and the resources it takes to do a relatively slow data transfer are nothing short of astonishing. Even if I do get this unit to work, it has already not been a good decision.

So, the conclusion? I use an Apple computer because of time efficiency and solid results when using it beyond the basic. Why the heck did I think avoiding the Apple solution was going to be good value this time? Sure, if it was only a Wifi connection, the Netgear is cool, but using a drive on the network for automated backups is taking it that bit further, and I should have known better. Lesson learnt? I hope I have! Think twice if you are buying new hardware about what you're buying and if saving a few.dollars or pounds will really work.

Hi all!

Been a long while, but we need to put a few thoughts to you about Beta browsers and developers/users responses to them. This was all brought into a new focus when, just a couple of weeks ago, Apple released the Public Beta of Safari 4.

Wow, what a browser, but what an even more amazing response to it! Let us try and put some perspective onto this, which we think shows how unique the response to this Safari Beta has been.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta has been with us for a while, and has some users, but not really a noticeable amount from the view of the world of development and support, and with Microsoft's track record of changing things dramatically after the release of a Beta, who could possibly afford to put work in to support it, only to have to redo that work in the near future? All developers were turning out the standard response of "We don't support browsers while in Beta". And why wouldn't they. Standard practice we all say, then....

Apple release the Public Beta of Safari 4! The Mac world in particular goes rampant on it, getting Safari 4 reaching over 1 percent of active browsing in a matter of days! In todays market, that is an unheard of response to a Beta, and this isn't just a 'normal' beta from the Mac perspective either. Safari 4 Beta replaces some core parts of the system, namely the WebKit system used by not just Safari, but apps like RapidWeaver (web authoring), DEVONnote (information gathering + browsing), LittleSnapper (screen and web shots with library and browser) and more besides. Other browser plugins were affected too, like 1Password (auto form filling & password generator, a constant companion to many Mac users).

What would be the response? Would we see the expected "We don't support browsers while in Beta"? Not so in this case. A matter of hours, and a little article was produced be Agile Web Solutions on how to get 1Password to accept being used by Safari 4 (a simple plist edit), and in less than 48hrs an update could be downloaded with a permanent fix. These solutions were made public through the use of Twitter very quickly. RealmacSoftware, not far behind, were quickly at work on fixes for RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver uses the WebKit system extensively for previewing sites during building. This meant some internal code changes. The first available fix was again a matter of just a few days. LittleSnapper seemed to work straight out of the box. This is just a quick look at 2 particularly 'on the ball' developers, and more responded too.

What a different response to a normal Beta release! We have to say we find Safari 4 Beta to be at least as stable as Safari 3.2.1, and perhaps this also was part of the reason for such a good reception and a phenomenal take up. It also seems to reduce the system resources required while increasing speed of rendering. For those of us doing web development, there are also awesome tools to help troubleshoot websites including some Javascript debugging. All without any extra plugins required. We even noticed there are significant improvements in the Windows version, running well even on some old machines we tried it on.

Does this set a different standard for Beta release, or is it just a one off? Time will tell. we haven't seen a response quite like it.

WebKarnage