As I wrote in an earlier post, I have been happily using a Time Capsule (500GB first-generation model) for a few month, and I'm really happy with it. I use it hooked to a DSL modem in bridge mode, and it serves as router for my home network, which has a mix of machines with fixed and DHCP-attributed IPs.
It has always worked reliably, both on the wireless connections and on the wired ones.
Until a while ago when it started acting strange. First, I would get disconnected from the Internet, and when I tried to open the TC in Airport Utility, it would hang trying to load the TC's configuration, and the only solution would be to unplug it from the main. Pressing the "reset" button would do nothing. At other times, I could still access the Web, but the Time Machine backups on the Time Capsule would fail, and, again, I couldn't access the configuration for the TC.
Then I remembered that the only thing that had changed recently was the update of the TC's firmware from 7.3.2 to 7.4.1.
So I went and reverted to 7.3.2 and, Boom!, all my troubles went away.
Here is how to do it:
Launch Airport Utility, click on your device in the left-hand source list, then click the "Manual setup" button to load the device's configuration, then open the "Base Station" menu and choose "Upload firmware...", like so:
Apple had the good idea (premonition?) to keep all the previous firmware updates somewhere in your Time Capsule, which means you can easily revert to a previous version even if you do not have an Internet connexion active:
Now, simply select "7.3.2" in the "Upload firmware" menu (this picture was taken after I reverted, that's why the "Current version" reads "7.3.2"), then click "OK". The firmware will be applied, your Time Capsule will reboot and everything will be peachy.
Now you just have to say "No" every time the Airport Utility asks you whether you want to upgrade to 7.4.1 and wait for a new version by Apple, hopefully less buggy than 7.4.1 (which brought the neat trick of allowing to access Airport Drives through Back to my Mac, which is not possible with firmware 7.3.2).
Oh, by the way, after fixing this I went and did a bit of Googling to check if I was the only one with this problem, and found out I wasn't. Simply go to Apple's Support forums and you'll find a whole crowd of people suffering from the 7.4.1 syndrome.
