Monthly Archives: September 2011

Getting the GoFlex Home to play nice with OS X Lion

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Recently I acquired a Macbook Air Mid 2011 model and I wanted to find a good backup regime. Since OS X has had a great backup software called Time Machine, which has been around since OS X 10.5 Leopard, I thought buying a Time Capsule would be the way to go. Unfortunately, due to budgetary constraints, I found that a 1TB Time Capsule that costs more than $300 a little bit of a stretch.

I went for a cheaper option and acquired the Seagate GoFlex Home 2TB drive for $100 less than the time capsule. When I took it home, though, the Time Machine could see the drive in the network, but did not want to backup to it, complaining about “The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features”. After persevering for a while, I went to search Google and found out in the Seagate forums that there was a firmware update for the drive, which I promptly downloaded through Preferences > Administration > Software Updates.

When the update was finished, I restarted the drive. I checked on the software version and I got version  2.5.3:2.0.0.367:1.2.331. Then I went to create a new user through Preferences > Administration > Add User.  As per the advice in the Seagate forum, I made sure that the user was not an admin user (do not click on the “Create As Administrator” checkbox in the GoFlex interface). I also ticked the Enable Computers Backup feature under Preferences > Administration > Computers Backup. I entered a password and then I restarted my MacBook Air and fired up Time Machine and Voila!

Time Machine is now working to backup my MacBook Air and it went on for 5 hours (my wifi is still on g, not n). I hope that someone will find this useful as I was getting a few gray hairs trying to make this work. I am not saying that this will work for everyone, but I hope it could be a starting point towards a solution.

The new MacBook Air and the dongle debacle

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For my day to day travel, I often take a 3G dongle as my own personal internet connection which does not get monitored, filtered and restricted, unlike the wifi connections available at the places that I am currently working. I carry the dongle with me everywhere I have my laptop, in case I need to connect to my server through SSH (work internet only permits ports 80 and 443).

Last year, after using a Huawei K3565 dongle from Vodafone, I purchased a Huawei E5832 wifi modem so that I can use it with other devices and share it with friends occasionally. I did not have any problems connecting it to my MacBook Pro on Snow Leopard. It worked flawlessly.

Last week, I acquired a new MacBook Air with OS X 10.7 Lion pre-installed and for the life of me, I could not get the modem to work via USB (still works as a wireless router of course). I sometimes connect the dongle directly via USB when the battery is going flat so I can keep using it regardless of the amount of charge left in the battery.

One suggestion in Whirlpool is to install the connect software from Three http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1751706 but cancelling it after it has installed drivers for the modem. I find this a little slack from both Huawei and Virgin to not have the USB connection issue resolved.

If you follow the suggestion to download the Three software, the post suggests that this method works.