I have been playing with connecting my multifunctional printer and scanner the HP PSC 1315 to the Apple Airport Extreme unit using a USB cable.
The marketing features describe how one can connect a hard drive or printer using the USB conection on the Airport extreme.
Unfortunately I have concluded that this software sucks both for printers and for hard drives. I would of expected Apple to provide a proxy USB interface so to a device driver installed on the Mac it thinks the device is actually connected to the Mac and doesn’t know about a network relay to the Airport USB. For hard drives also providing a layer of intelligence to sync write caches.
What Apple have built clearly doesn’t provide this type of interface leaving companies like HP, in this case, at the mercy of Apple to provide a correct interface description specifically to use the USB port on the Airport Extreme. In my mind this defeats the whole purpose of the USB port on the Airport Express and Extreme.
The only compatible multi functional devices that are supported are WiFi based. Reading various blogs and forums I also conclude that connecting a hard drive and trying to use Time Machine is frought with difficulty. I have even tried this myself and it did not work.
Apple – please sort this out. We want the USB port on the Airport range of products to work like any other USB on the Mac!
