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2008-03-02

Wireless Woes

Strange behaviour: Everything was fine, working with my MBP on a multi-AP WDS network of new Airport Extreme base stations; move to another floor, just next to an AP, can't see the signal, or rather I see it fleetingly, get asked for password, then it disappears. My first conclusion is that the AP must be caput, but back upstairs, where I started, I now see no signal.

Another laptop can see the signal fine. I try manually changing network setup, restart, shutdown, even taking out the battery then restart. Still no wifi connection. I conclude that the wifi card in my laptop must be damaged, or at least have a dodgy aerial connection.

Back at home I still have the same problem—and neither Airport Utility, nor iStumbler can see the signal either. I think I'll try looking at the wifi card.

To check on how to do that I need to get online. So I find an ethernet cable and connect a LAN port on one of my base stations. I'm now online, as expected, but I didn't expect to see Airport Utility and iStumbler burst into life just because I made a wired connection. Everything looks normal, and Network preferences now says I have a wireless connection.

I unplug the ethernet cable, and everything stays fine; back to normal. I don't pretend to understand why.

update

It happened again!

Same symptoms - persisting across two different WDS networks.

Again, recovery coincided with my decision to give up hope and use a wired connection to my base station.

Crazy!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

WIFI in Leopard is very unstable. See the thousands of messages on the apple discussion group.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1422613&tstart=0

It is a problem with Leopard - It just doesn't work.

Good luck on finding a solution - would love to hear about it if you find one.