Wed, 23 Aug 2006
Reading Airport Express Logs Without syslog
A couple of days ago I was trying to get a new device connected to an Airport Express AP but wasn't having any success. I wanted to find out if the problem was authorisation-related or something else. I knew that the Airport Admin Utility allows you to set the base station to log to a syslog host but I didn't want to go through the hassle of configuring such a setup.
I eventually discovered an article stating the Airport Extreme Base Station has a 128KB local log cache. The article also described how to configure syslog on a remote machine. More interestingly for me it also mentioned you can read the cached logs on the base station using an "AirPort Management Utility". The tool apparently used to be documented but that's now a dead link. I assume it's documented in the Airport Extreme Base Station manuals (Update: it is) but nowhere else on Apple's site seems to describe it.
I did find a download link for the AirPort Management Utility from the AirPort support page.
I decided I'd see if the utility would find logs on the Airport Express as well and long story short it did. Cool, no configuration necessary. (Only other description of the tool.)
Update: Weird, Planet didn't seem to like the <tt> in the post title so I removed it...
Posted at: 23:15 | category: / | Comments ()