You'll probably want to edit "Skethy", and it should be "all been for nought".

Sorry to be a pedant, I was going to let the first one go, but two makes me twitch !!

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This was the exact problem I was having! It sure was darn annoying, but I thought it was my router. I'll try this once I get home.

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It should be 'naught'.

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I have have drops like you describe with a powerbook G4 1.25 and two different (different models) DLink access points. Very randomly the connection drops. I may go for weeks without this happening. I can reset the AP and it will reconnect or I can reset the airport card by disabling and enabling it and it will reconnect. Sounds somewhat similar to the problem you describe. This problem has existed for me previous to 10.4.8.

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I remember that at times, my PowerBook wouldn't see the network or would time out, and if I fired up my Windows laptop I could connect with no problems. I think Airport's needed an update for a while.

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I have these problems under 10.4.8, and without WPA2. Dropped out about 5 times already today. The connection just goes away.

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Sweet jesus I hope this works. My problem has been different though - my iMac (1/06 mint) doesn't drop my APE network, it just spins its wheels. I try to load pages and the status wheel keeps spinning, and the pages often load but very, very slowly.

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This is mostly due to the WPA and other WIFI encryption schemes that apple has implemented as the norms were published.
The best I found for no drop at all is the following :
- uncheck "SSID broadcasting" : so no one will know your network name
- don't encrypt anything (no wep, no wpa)
- allow only the MAC address of your computer to connect to this network : it's the airport ID of your network card (something like ab:cd:ef:xx:00:00)
- if your router allows it, it's better to assign a static permanent IP address to your MAC so your mac won't ask every 10s "who am I ?"


So wanabe pirates will have first to find your wifi network name, but then will be blocked because only your allowed computers can connect. Since there are so many open wifi networks out there they'll just go to the next one without bothering with yours.

I guarantee no drops at all !!
If not I'll send you 10 billion $ in cash :-)

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I think I fixed my issues by first Removing the all the servers in the Airport settings list, and after that removing all wireless server passwords from Keychain.
After that I restarted and re-entered my password. Haven't had a disconnection since (50 minutes)!

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I haven't experienced drops or unreliability with my Intel iMac, but I do have a different issue: If I ever reboot, OS X says it can't find any of my preferred networks, and connects to nothing. However, the networks are listed in the Airport menu item, and all I have to do is select one and I'm all set. For some reason, though, it won't connect automatically on reboot...no matter what I try.

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This is such great news! I thought I was alone in this issue. But now I'm just glad to know that others are in the same boat as me.

BTW, the problem isn't limited to Intel Macs. I have PowerMac G5 and this has been happening for the last three months.

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I was having all sorts of wifi issues with my airport express and intel imac. The connection would just crap out and sometimes multiple reboots would not even solve the issue. After days of messing with stuff, I enabled "Interference Robustness" on both my iMac and in the base station options... and lo and behold problem solved.

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this article seems to be WPA2 and possible 10.4.6 specific - I've had this as a long running problem on 2 MacBooks since day 1 (there are numerous unanswered threads in the apple discussion forums that mostly relate to wireless voodoo-type solutions).

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I was having trouble with an Intel mini, and it was related to IPX - it seems the Netgear router - specifically MR814v2 - has trouble accepting Airport connections (ie, it won't) when a Windows box is connected via a cable and IPX is enabled.

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to #8. Slight flaw in your plan there.

"allow only the MAC address of your computer to connect to this network : it's the airport ID of your network card (something like ab:cd:ef:xx:00:00)"

Hacker simply sniffs for mac addresses flying past of allowed machines, and soft configures his machine to be one of those addresses.

I'm not saying this works for you, but it sure works for me. ;-)

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I have a similar problem here. Each time I reboot my MacBook Pro I also have to reboot my wi-fi router, if I don't do that, after a few minutes the MPB will drop the connection.

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to #16, Hajis: Slight flaw in your plan too...

Two nodes cannot occupy the same MAC on a network. The only way it works is if the node's MAC you are spoofing also disconnects from the network.

That means a wardriver is going to have to sit and wait to sniff out a MAC and then wait for that MAC to sign off just to get access!

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Funny ... but the move to 10.4.8 seemed to rectify the problem for me. MBP15, and I was having much flakiness under 10.4.7, and everything's been quite peachy since I upgraded to 10.4.8. Maybe there's just weirdness out there ...

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Well I tried this anyways, even though I use WEP. I normally can go several hours in OS X on my MBP without disconnecting (XP is fine) but when it does disconnect it's always at the worst times so I figure it is well worth the shot.

A an aside, I had noticed these wireless issues always seem encyption-related, as using my old college wifi network never yielded a singal drop. It could also be my router, as my old laptop used to disconnect on occasion, though it'd reconnect automatically instead of doing nothing.

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Similar problem with a MacBook and a Linksys WRT54G router. Connection kept dropping at random times, tried everything I could think of, was about to phone Apple support then thought I'd try upgrading the router firmware. Problem solved!

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