Time Capsule Bonjour issue

Last week Apple gave me a Time Capsule because of all of the problems I had with my Mac. That was awesome of them!

My network at home consisted of an Airport Extreme as my router and 802.11n wireless access point, with a Linksys acting in bridge mode and a 802.11g wireless access point. I did this because separating the N and G devices makes the N network much, much faster.

I decided I would make the new Time Capsule my router, as it also has gigabit ethernet, and replace the Linksys with my current Airport Extreme. Thus the process would be:

Migrate the Airport Extreme to bridge mode

Change the Airport Extreme to 802.11n (2.4ghz)

Change the Airport Extreme SSID to the 802.11g SSID

Set up the Time Capsule with the old Airport Extreme settings

Steps 1-3 went fine. When I installed the Time Capsule it said “Hey! Do you want to replace an existing device?” and I answered “Yes!” and chose my old Airport Extreme settings from the list.

I then renamed the Device to “Time After Time” (clever, eh?) and was up and running!

Or so I thought.

Throughout the week, my backups were slow, my network was acting funny, all sorts of weird issues.

At first I thought it might be that the Time Capsule disk had spaces in the name, which unix does not like, so I renamed the disk using Airport Utility via the Disks panel.

That did not help, then on the Time Capsule tab I discovered one major issue:

The bonjour name (shown here correctly) had been copied from the Airport Extreme and worse, not changed when I changed the Time Capsule name. The Airport Extreme was still in use, so there were two devices on the network with the same bonjour name.

I clicked the Edit… button and changed the bonjour name to timeaftertime.local. Since then, things have been much, much smoother.

Be careful when you let Apple make things easy for you!