I recently had my first ever disk corruption on a firewire drive with an Oxford 911 chipset. It was right after the 10.3.2 update that had software to fix the famous Firewire 800 - Oxford 922 chipset problem. It was bad and I supposed the two were related. I now believe this was a coincidence, and that the real culprit was a 'new-to-me' Firewire card in a machine a rarely use which used an NEC chipset. My other cards all used a TI chipset, and in reading the XPF forum archives, I came across that these NEC firewire cards corrupt data on unsupported Mac's. Too late, but I switched the card and it appears that it was the real problem, so avoid NEC chipsets on Firewire cards.
After the 10.3.2 update combined with the recent XPF 3.0a10 I had many boot problems related to SCSI drives which I attributed to one of these updates. Usually the SCSI drives wouldn't boot, and also wouldn't mount upon booting from a Firewire drive, even if the SCSI was the 'helper' drive in the Firewire boot process. It would 'help' and then not mount? I believe the culprit may be contained in the Security Update 12-19-03. I had a machine without this update, and it mounted SCSI better, and booted also, until after the Security Update? Now it's the same as the others, with "Still waiting for root device" being the verbose hang point.
I've had some success running the older XPF 3.0a3 over the top of 3.0a9 or 3.0a10 (without deleting the newer extensions). This is the only way I've been able to boot some SCSI only machines.
Adding a wireless router to an existing wired router might be a good idea, especially if the wireless has some problems that aren't an issue with the wired router. I had two wireless routers that neither worked correctly with AOL for OS X in the sign-on process of the BYOA (bring your own access) with a cable modem connection. This is a rare problem involving PPPoE, so I doubt many would run into it. I had a wired D-Link 704 that worked perfectly. I was able to add a wireless D-Link 514 as a passive hub and it somehow worked perfectly also, even wirelessly. Newer routers autodetect the cable type and configure themselves appropriately to work. I used it identically setup with both a normal & later a crossover cable in the same configuration. Whomever got rid of the insidious crossover cable need by inventing this autodetect really was helpful.
The process I used to add the wireless was simple, but not straight forward for me, so I'll describe it. Since I was using both D-Link routers that used the same default IP address, and both had setup programs that used a browser, I needed to change the IP addresses so that they were each unique. Then I disabled the DHCP server mode of the wireless router, and connected the two routers via cable, LAN port-to-LAN port, leaving the WAN port of the wireless empty, and having the cable modem going to the WAN of the wired router. There was one small hitch with the D-Link DI-514 and the regular Apple Airport cards. There was a default setting for something called the "preamble length" which was set to "short". It needed to be changed to "long" in order to connect with an Airport card. This may be a problem with other wireless routers that appear to have strong signal, but don't connect with Airport cards. My two router setup has fixed the AOL problem and everything seems to work perfectly. Kris Tilford
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