Airport extreme/hard drive problems

Question

Any advice appreciated...
Our airport extreme only intermittently recognizes our Lace hard drive and it's driving us crazy. We bought macbook, the airport, and hard drive at the same time (yes we abandoned the PC world) and had a friend hook it up. For two months everything worked fine and we even hooked our printer to the airport and printed wirelessly.
Then for no particular reason, the harddrive disappeared and we can no longer access it wirelessly. We can, however, plug the harddrive USB into the Macbook and we can use the harddrive perfectly. Also, interesting, if we open airport utility and click on "disks", the harddrive is there, but it doesn't show up on the desktop or Finder and we can't access it.
I've called Apple tech support numerous times (We bought the extra service, but sadly that didn't keep us from having to spend an extremely obnoxious time on hold. We thought Apples were supposed to easy. but that's another story..). So far, we did get the airport and Macbook to recognize the hard drive by simultaneously renaming the harddrive and unplugging the hard drive and Airport. That worked for exactly 18 hours. Then the harddrive disappeared again. I called tech support twice but after 45 minutes on hold each time, I lost my patience. (They make us hold for the first step, then hold again for the product specialists. Gee we sure are glad we spent extra for the extended service!)
Other interesting tidbits: We've never had a problem with wireless internet service and have always been able to wireless send jobs to the printer.
Any ideas?
Signed and thank you,
Not so sure switching to Apple was a good move.

Answer 1

This is the most acceptable solution I have come up with:
Either go to the DHCP tab under internet settings on the router and "reserve" IP numbers for any hardware that interacts with the drive or manually set IP numbers in your network instead of using DHCP. The problem occurs when an IP number to any computer connected to the drive changes unexpectedly. This would be whenever the DHCP lease renews if your computer is asleep when this happens. I have not had a single drive issue since I set this up.
If you need to access your drive from a remote location where you don't have control over how the network there operates, then avoid letting your computer sleep while it is connected to the drive.
I chose to manually assign an IP number to my desktop and also to remote base stations, however this is not so convenient for my laptop because it then wants to use the manual settings everywhere unless I set up another "location" which has to be manually changed. This is where reserving IP numbers under the DHCP tab was really useful. The laptops on my network are still getting their numbers from the DHCP server but the server knows to give each one the same number based on their MAC addresses.
If you take a look at the default settings for DHCP, you will notice that not all the available numbers are being assigned through the DHCP server. You can use numbers outside this range (other than x.x.x.255) for your manually assigned IP numbers and still have DHCP running for when guests come over to use your network.
Message was edited by: Tom Alperin