Another potential fix for Intel Mac + Airport station problems

Hi,

I'm just now reading this article and have been having the same problems with my March 2006 Intel Mini (1.66 GHz).

I looked around the site to see if you'd posted a follow up to this post. I couldn't find one so I'm hoping you can answer this question: Now that you've had some more time to try it, has disabling WPA2 continued to work for you?

I've looked everywhere for insight on this issue and your two posts about it are the most reliable info I've found. Much thanks.

I see the followin gproblem: I can easily connect to a WPA personal
AP with my old powerbook, while the new mbpro C2D I got keeps
telling that the password I use is the wrong one.

VERY strange indeed, I expected apple to have these things solved
before putting a new piece of hardware (ie. wireless card) in their
machines.

Quite annoying !

Rudi

My Wireless at home uses WPA2 Enterprise with EAP username/password challenge and i have had no issue with connectivity on my macbook.

some machines ship with the Atheros (a/b/g) while others ship with the broadcom that seems to have draft-n support.

I have the atheros and no issues.

I have a new MBP C2D. I share my DSL internet hooked into the Ethernet over the MBP's airport using internet sharing with my other macs in the house. All computers can use internet, but file sharing is more difficult. The older macs with older airport cards (PB G3, iBook G3, PM G4) list all computers on the network in the finder window's network volume. The iMac 24 C2D only sees the MBP and the MBP does not see any of the others. I can connect to the others and share files if I use the Finder's Go menu to connect to server and type in the others IP address. But this is not reliable. If I use the PB G3 as the router, internet and file sharing works perfectly on all macs. I have been working with an Applecare hardware specialist on this for a week and have yet to resolve the issue. I think there are some hardware or firmware issues, but Apple does not agree.

my macbook pro 17inch shows a little internet sharing icon(arrow on top of the airport radar) and my internet is cut off even though i dont share anything.and the only way to fix it is to restart

Note this isn't just an airport problem. Check out the networking forums in the MBP support forums and you'll see a lot of people having this or similar issues with all kinds of routers. I had to go out and buy a new router to get a reliable secure connection with my new MBP C2D.. but it's still sort of flakey and pops in and out. See this thread for lot more info:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3473263&#3473263

I've been using WEP and having connection issues, similar to nggalai's experiences. On other open networks though I'd never experience it. I may try disabling WEP is see if it's the Netgear router or if it's using encryption.

Another thing you could do, if you want to restrict access but use an open network, would be to restrict access to only certain MAC addresses. Though I'm sure somebody could spoof their way past this, it would prevent the common wifi leecher from hopping on if they happened to see your network.

I had quite a few wireless problems with my Intel Mac after upgrading to 10.4.8. I switched from WPA to WEP and it has been working perfectly since. Hopefully the WPA problems will be fixed soon.

you do realize that without security anyone can sniff ALL of your packets. You're effectively broadcasting all of your internet traffic to the world.
I hope you at LEAST have MAC (address) security going on so you dont have a wide open access point for people to pirate your internet.

I too noticed slower response times after updating to 10.4.8. What finally solved the problem for me was hard coding my ISP's DNS addresses into my network connection. Things are back to normal now.