How to view logs in Airport Utility v6, or install 5.6 in Mountain Lion?

So I just upgraded to Mountain Lion, and I'm watching some Netflix over my Apple TV, when it stops streaming and tells me it's not connected to the network any more. Sure enough, my Air has also lost it's network connectivity and the Airport Extreme is solid Amber on the status light.

I wait a while, it starts to flash green, then it goes green, and slowly my SSIDs start to appear, and everything is normal again.

I presume the AE just rebooted, so I fire up Airport extreme to look at the logs, and remember that in Airport Utility 6.0, all the nice advanced features (and some not so advanced ones) are not available. Amongst them is viewing the logs. So I download 5.6, which is the most recent non-6.0 version that uses the old ways and lets you view logs etc - and it won't install because it's not compatible with Mountain Lion.

A bit of googling about also reveals that apparently V6.0 will only manage Wireless-N networks. Seems anyone with older Airport kit, or a need to do anything slightly advanced in ML is screwed.

Anyone know how I can either view logs in 6, or install 5.6 on 10.8?

If you do not want (or can't) get the app out of a backup you can extract it from the installer.

Download the Airport Utility 5.6 for Lion and move the file AirPortUtility56.pkg contained within the dmg to your ~/Downloads folder. Then in a Terminal window do :

$ cd ~/Downloads
$ pkgutil --expand ./AirPortUtility56.pkg ~/Downloads/AirPortUtility56
$ gunzip -c < ./AirPortUtility56/AirPortUtility56Lion.pkg/Payload | sudo tar -C / -xvf - "./Applications/Utilities/AirPort Utility 5.6.app"

The app works without issue on Mountain Lion in my limited testing so far.

If you wanted to mod the package to skip the check, if you want to easily install the package on multiple macs for instance, here's what you need :

A tool called "Flat Package Editor" to modify the file called Distribution in AirPortUtility56.pkg. To get that tool download the "Auxiliary tools for Xcode" from the Apple Dev site. It's hidden in PackageMaker.app/Contents/resources/Flat Package Editor.app. With it you can open the pkg directly :

Just drag out the Distribution file and remove these lines :

// Less than 10.8
if(-1 != system.compareVersions(my.target.systemVersion.ProductVersion, '10.8')) {
  my.result.type = 'Fatal';
  my.result.message = system.localizedString('ERR_OSHIGH');
  return (false);
}

Drag the new version back in, delete the old Distribution and save.

I restored version 5.6 from my Time Machine backup of Lion and it works properly, however you should also be able to download it from Apple and extract the application from the .pkg using Pacifist.

I use Airport Utilty for Windows on my virtual PC in Vmware Fusion to configure advanced settings.

I too was unable to get any of the installers to install any older 5.x version of the utility onto Mountain Lion, but I did copy over AirPort Utility 5.3.3 from a Lion machine and it has been working fine for days to manage some hardware. It is not signed so GateKeeper will prevent you from running it until you go to security preference and allow downloads from anywhere to run.

I'll probably set up syslogd forwarding so I don't need to fire up a Lion VM or boot back into Lion for routine diagnostics.

This is a bit of a pain to not be able to do some of the following things with a supported client on Mountain Lion:

• save and manage profiles
• see signal strength graphs
• configure syslog forwarding
• look at the system logs

This seems like a poor solution since the newer AirPort extremes are not usable even on 5.6 version of the software and I strongly dislike using unsupported software to manage something like a network router.