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Airport being difficult

r-sparks

r-sparks

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 1, 2006
255
0
England
I recently bought an iMac 20in (2.16Ghz core duo).

The built-in Airport refuses to connect to my 3Com 3CRWDR100A-72 wifi ADSL router, but only if I'm using WPA.

It sees the router, and when I connect I'm prompted for my WPA Personal password. But then it tells me there was a problem connecting. I seem to be able to connect if I use Internet Connect but, when I reboot, the connection doesn't work ALTHOUGH the wifi icon shows it as connected. It appears I've no IP when I use ifconfig in the terminal window.

I've switched to 64-bit WEP and it seems to be working consistently across reboots, but I'd like to use WPA.

Oh, and every now and again, pages take an age to load, seemingly after a period of inactivity. This might be an ADSL issue, however, because I've recently switched ISP.

(I should mention that I've got the most up to date firmware for the 3Com, although LOTS of people reported problems with it before the firmware was updated. It's a *cough* budget model.)
 
r-sparks said:
Oh, and every now and again, pages take an age to load, seemingly after a period of inactivity. This might be an ADSL issue, however, because I've recently switched ISP.
Click to expand...

Hmmm... When the time-out happens, and pages take an age to load, I also can't ping the router. This is definitely a problem with the iMac. It's as if the Airport is disconnecting during periods of inactivity, and then trying to reconnect when pages are requested. This takes around 30 seconds.
 
If I were you I'd manually assign an IP address rather than getting one from DHCP. Just pick a vacant IP in the range, ie if your router is 192.168.1.1 then maybe 192.168.1.101.

You should at least then have connectivity, even if using WPA still results in other, more minor, issues.
 
miniConvert said:
If I were you I'd manually assign an IP address rather than getting one from DHCP. Just pick a vacant IP in the range, ie if your router is 192.168.1.1 then maybe 192.168.1.101.

You should at least then have connectivity, even if using WPA still results in other, more minor, issues.
Click to expand...

OK, I've done the following, and the wifi connection seems to be holding (although there are reports of the problem returning after a couple of hours, almost as if the connection degrades over time):

1) Assigned a static IP address; my router uses 192.168.1.1-255, so I chose 50

2) Switched the wifi channel on the wifi router to 1.

3) Deactivated IPv6 in the Network section of System Preferences, which is always a good idea if you're not using IPv6 (and you probably won't be)

4) Again, in the Network section of System Preferences, I changed the wifi connection so that it joins my preferred networks, and removed some old entries for old wifi networks.
 
Glad that helped :) It'll be interesting to see if your connection does indeed fail after a period of time and then also fail to automatically reconnect until manually told to.

In my experience the connection drops out from anywhere between a couple of hours and a day, regardless of whether it is in use or not.
 
miniConvert said:
If I were you I'd manually assign an IP address rather than getting one from DHCP. Just pick a vacant IP in the range, ie if your router is 192.168.1.1 then maybe 192.168.1.101.

You should at least then have connectivity, even if using WPA still results in other, more minor, issues.
Click to expand...

I'm having similar problems with the airport connection on my Power Mac G5. When it wakes up or restarts, it sometimes shows it is connected to the linksys wireless router but doesn't have an IP address. My Windows PCs are connecting with no problems.

I presume I will have to manually assign a unique IP address for each computer I connect to the router, even if they are connected by ethernet?
 
r-sparks said:
OK, I've done the following, and the wifi connection seems to be holding (although there are reports of the problem returning after a couple of hours, almost as if the connection degrades over time):

1) Assigned a static IP address; my router uses 192.168.1.1-255, so I chose 50

2) Switched the wifi channel on the wifi router to 1.

3) Deactivated IPv6 in the Network section of System Preferences, which is always a good idea if you're not using IPv6 (and you probably won't be)

4) Again, in the Network section of System Preferences, I changed the wifi connection so that it joins my preferred networks, and removed some old entries for old wifi networks.
Click to expand...

Nope, none of the tips above have worked. The main problem is that the connection is dropped randomly, seemingly mostly after periods of inactivity.

Then I've got to stare at the browser status bar while it spends 20 seconds or so showing something like, "Looking up www.apple.com...". When it connects everything is back to normal.

Also weird is the fact that the router is 1 metre away from the iMac, yet the signal bars on the desktop indicate only three out of four. My iBook downstairs shows all four bars!

In Internet Connect on the iMac, they show even less than this - just under half signal strength.

Let's hope that the next bug fix nails this one. It's really annoying.

EDIT: Switched to Ethernet cable. The connection now works fine.
 
OllyW said:
I'm having similar problems with the airport connection on my Power Mac G5. When it wakes up or restarts, it sometimes shows it is connected to the linksys wireless router but doesn't have an IP address. My Windows PCs are connecting with no problems.

I presume I will have to manually assign a unique IP address for each computer I connect to the router, even if they are connected by ethernet?
Click to expand...

The problem I'm having seems only to affect Intel Macs.

Have you tried the fix on this page:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article....ocs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304482
 
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