How to install and use the Airport utility under Mountain Lion

I have a bunch of Apple wireless gear  at my house.  It’s inexpensive, feature rich and easy to maintain.  However, with the update to mountain lion a while ago, the ability to install  the older Airport Utility stopped.  This is annoying since I have what apple now considers “advanced” features like IPv6 at my home and essentially all my gear here is a lab (except for the plex server =) I’ve been spending a lot of time on cacti lately, and I wanted to test out the syslog plugin….ok, easy.  It’s all set up.  Then I got to thinking “why not just let this run and syslog all my gear like the good ‘ol days?”  Nerdy?  Yes, but hey, I collect flow data at home and have a weathermap of my home network.  It keeps me eating my own dog food with the netflow exporter plugin on pfSense and it’s fun. Uh, oh.  No ability to set syslog receiver on the airport gear anymore.  Not cool.  [Guess what, no way to change IPv6 settings anymore either] No way to do a standard install of the old utility. Lame, Apple, Lame.  After poking around a bit I found a pretty easy way to do it as long as you’re not afraid of the command line. Since at least a few other folks will want to do this, here it is: Download the App from Apple. Mount the Downloaded disk. Open Terminal. Type:

pkgutil –expand /Volumes/AirPortUtility/AirPortUtility56.pkg
cd ~/Desktop/AirPortTemp~/Desktop/AirPortTemp/AirPortUtility56Lion.pkg/
open Payload
cd “Payload 2 2/Applications/Utilities/”
open .

Done.  That should open a finder window with the App in it.  You can copy it to you /Applications/Utilities folder and use it alongside the newer one.  You’ll need to authenticate to copy into the /Applications/Utilities directory. Edits made and Poof!  Now I can see my syslogs from within cacti.