New MacBook Pro - Airport & internet reception problems. Please help.
 

I just got a new MacBook Pro which is having problems with the networking. What I notice most is that I keep getting dropped from the internet. I'd consider this a router problem except it's not happening to my PB, only the MBP.

The problem seems to relate to a couple of other threads I've read, but nothing I've read has resolved the problem:

10.4.10 made my wireless go sucky - None of the solutions in that thread have worked, and since this is a new MBP, I don't know if this is a software or hardware issue.

iMac vs MacBook Pro signal reception. - I'm also finding that my new MBP has stronger signal reception than my PB. Not only is my reception stronger, but so are the receptions of the other networks around me.

I'd like to know if this is a software issue that everyone's having with 10.4.10 or could it be a hardware issue with my MBP? If it's hardware, I'd like to send it in for repair asap; however, I really hate allowing anyone access to my computer with my personal data on it. I hope someone can give me a clue on which way to go with this.

In the spirit of being thorough, here's the best info I can think of to offer. If there's anything else needed, just let me know.

Hardware setup:

• MBP info in sig line, all RAM came already installed from Apple.
• Using Airport Express; purchased last January.
• Very simple network: Cable modem to Airport Express to MBP. Nothing else connected to the network (no printers, hubs, nothing).

Software settings:

• Security: WPA2 Personal
• Radio Mode: 802.11g Only
• Channels I've tried: Auto, 3, 4 (Auto just stays on channel 1. I've used Auto with my PB since January.)
• Multicast Rate: 24Mbps
• Transmit Power: 100%
• Closed Network: ON
• Interference Robustness: ON
• Access Control: Local with my PB and MBP MAC addresses listed
• Using DHCP
• Use Interference Robustness: ON - I usually keep this turned on, but have tried it both ways. While it's helpful in general, it has no effect on this particular problem.

Reception readings, Other:

• Using the AirTrafficControl 2.0.1beta400 widget for signal info.
• My network is showing high 50s to low 60s when I'm about 6 feet away from the airport express.
• I'm picking up 6 other networks in the area, 2 of which have strong signals in the mid/high 50s and sometimes low 60s. One of those networks frequently has an equal to stronger signal than my own network.
• Channels of other networks: 1, 6, 6, 10, 11, 11 with the 2 strongest networks using channels 1 and 10 (10 is the strongest).
• I do NOT have any phone other than my cell phone. But I have no idea what others have around me.
• This is not my regular location; it is a second location in an apartment complex which accounts for all the other networks close to me.
• My Widgets work even when experiencing the problem. I read this elsewhere, but I can't remember where now. It is an interesting element to the issue which leads me to think it's software related.
• Other software is affected such as a weather app for my menu bar. It randomly goes between showing the weather info and showing "no internet".
• I can have no internet connection even though my menu bar icon shows 4 bars and ATC says my signal strength is in the 60s. But keep in mind that my PB does work so it's not the Airport Express. It seems to be some kind of miscommunication between the MBP and the Airport Express.
• The problem occurs when I'm on battery power AND using the charger (charging and fully charged). This is different from what people reported in the "sucky" thread in which they only had the problem when using battery power.
• It seems the problem occurs when I've sat idle on the internet, such as when reading an article. I'm not positive about this (I read a lot), but it does seem to be a pattern.

Things I've tried:

• Running without security - No effect. I tried this as per the solution in the "sucky 10.4.10" thread. However, the thread did not specify whether there was a need to restart, close Safari, etc. It also made no mention regarding hidden networks. What I did was change the security from WPA2 Personal to None, rebooted the Airport Express, and used the internet for about 15 minutes. It seemed to work just fine so I thought maybe that had fixed it so I turned the security back on. However, a little later the problem returned (or was never fixed).
• Turning Interference Robustness on and off via the Airport Menu Bar Icon - No effect.
• Turning Airport off and on via the Airport Menu Bar Icon - This works! But only temporarily.
• Restarting, fixing permissions, etc. - No effect.

The "sucky" thread mentioned reapplying the 10.4.10 update, but I don't know how to do it. I didn't get the impression I'm supposed to simply double click the original package so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to download to do this.

This problem is very aggravating. It's very random, and it's a very on/off type of thing. It's not as if the internet slows down. It's more that I'm being connected and disconnected to the internet via Airport even though my network signal is fine.

I've waited all this time to finally get a new MBP and this was not what I was hoping for. :( Can anyone help?

On the question of reloading the 10.4.10 update. You won't be able to reload the incremental update, so you will need to download the combined updater here: http://www.apple.com/support/downloa...ev11intel.html

Download that .dmg file, and then run the package file that opens. You can always apply the current combined updater, even if you are already using that version. Repair permissions after the install. Then recheck through software update that you are up-to-date.

I would suggest leaving your security off, just as a test to see if your connection goes out again. At least, as long as you are comfortable with doing that. I understand with lots of wireless connections available, you may have others connect, but perhaps that would stress the connection a little more, and if your connection remains up with security off, then the hardware controlling those security settings could be intermittent. I couldn't tell by your post if you gave 'security off' a fair try.

Thanks, Delta. I'll give that a try.

My security should be somewhat okay given that my network is hidden, right? They'd have to first know of its existence before they'd know to use it. Plus, since I've named the internet cards that can connect by their MAC address, I don't think any other computer can connect even if they did find the network. Is this right?

I'm not too worried about anyone piggy-backing on my network itself. I've done that many times myself. My only real concern is to ensure that my data on my computer cannot be accessed.

Let me give the updater a try and run without security for awhile and see what happens. Wish me luck!

Well hiding it and only allowing certain mac-addresses makes it a little safer but don't count on it. A good scanner will see it anyway and they can borrow one of your allowed addresses and use it. So make sure you have your firewalls up and be careful with everything.

Thanks, baf. Firewall is up. I really don't like running things this way, but if it's only temporary...

But I've ran into a problem. Look at the error message I received when I tried to install the combined updater!

I double checked software update, and it says all my software is up to date. Why can't I install the combo updater? I've never had this happen before.

BTW, I should note that my internet hung while I was downloading the updater and also while I was writing this reply. Turning airport off and then back on fixes it, but only temporarily. This last hang occurred while I was running with security turned off on my airport express.

Now what? :confused:

I think I recall someone having discovered that Airport problems were caused by a 3rd-party Airport monitor (maybe a Widget).

I did just upgrade AirTrafficController widget. Let me delete it and see if there's any improvement.

Closed any and all widgets that had anything to do with networking. Problem still there. In fact, the widgets stopped working. I have one widget that displays my current IP Address, and it shows no WAN connected.

So I fired up Airport Utility. It says it can't find a base station. But my Airport menu icon is showing 3 bars.

I'll have to turn airport off and back on just to post this message.

Umm... scratch that. Just as I was writing that, my airport menu icon changed to 4 bars. I double checked, and sure enough, I'm connected again. I did not do anything to make it reconnect!

It's been almost 3 hours, and the problem continues to exist rather significantly, It happens when I'm active on the computer, when I'm idle, when it's plugged in to the charger, when it's using the battery, at full charge, at low charge... I cannot find a pattern of any kind. The only given is that turning airport off and back on resets it to work again.

All the threads I've read so far seem to include airport expresses and not extremes. Is there anyone who knows the technical difference between the two to even narrow down what the problem could be? Does anyone have even a hint of a clue on any of this?

It's doing it again right now. :(

I am seeing this too. I have a MBP 2.16GHz, with the same Airport as you. I am in the next room from the router, and have full signal-strength reading.

I have not installed any widgets, and I have run 10.4.10 since I got the laptop a week ago. As you do not seem to be running .10 that must not be related. My base station is a Belkin pre-N router, and I am running WPA1 personal over 802.11g, channel 1. Not willing to try it without security, and I suggest you don't either.

I have the problem mainly when doing a significant download, but occasionally otherwise. Turning it off and on again fixes it for me too. When doing a fast download (2MB/s) I would say it fails every five minutes or so. I presume that the big 'B' means bytes. At least in the old days it did, and all interfaces were rated in bits so I am getting true 20Mb/s which isn't bad.

I'd installed HenWen (Snort) for network intrusion monitoring, and found that when it was on I could not get more than 30 seconds of fast download before it failed, so I deinstalled HenWen.

There is an 802.11n enabler, which should triple the transfer speed and operating distance, at the Apple Store for $2, but I've read user comments that installing it and connecting to a non-Airport base station had dropped speed by a factor of ten, so I am reluctant to buy it. Apparently it can't be uninstalled.

I think I fixed mine!
 

I think I have my problem resolved, but I'm still double checking just in case.

I noticed a couple of things. First, all the complaints on this I could find were about Airport Expresses (AExp) and never any Airport Extremes.

I thought that was key as it seemed to be a communications error of some kind between the MBP and the Airport Expresses so I started rummaging around my log files. That's when I noticed this error line that repeated itself with each time I was dropped from the internet:

While I mostly don't know what any of the log file lines mean, I couldn't help noticing the words, error and routing, combined on that line. That fit my thought that it was a communications error between the MBP and AExp.

I also noticed another line constantly repeated which I knew also had to do with airport:

So here's what I did. I don't know if any of this fixed things, but those errors are no longer coming up and so far, I haven't had any drops. Yet.

I was already running an insecure network which I despised, but I had to give it a try. I don't think that did a thing. I continued to have problems while running that way.

I decided to reconfigure my AExp. Normally, I just hit the manual button, but this time I went through the assistant. It really doesn't do much, but it did claim to create a new network even though I used my same old settings. Any settings not specified in this process remained as they were before. At this time, I switched back to WPA2 Personal.

I also turned AppleTalk off and back on just to see if it could shake any of the settings.

And I asked for a new DHCP lease.

I noticed that my network settings were set to connect to the internet via ethernet, airport, and bluetooth, in that order. I unchecked ethernet and bluetooth and just left airport.

Now I turned off airport and shut down my MBP.

I then unplugged my entire network which is really only the cable modem and AExp. I disconnected and later reconnected the cable, as well. I wanted to reset everything.

After leaving things off for a short while, I finally allowed the network to have power and let it connect. Then I powered up my MBP. And, finally, I turned on Airport.

After doing all of that, I have not had a single occurrence of those error messages. I did connect with another AExp network at my doctor's office and then my Airport Extreme network at my home. In all cases, the connections were perfect.

Now, I'm back at my apartment, and to my surprise, I'm getting the highest reading ever with the AirTrafficControl widget. It's showing 73 and 74! I've never had readings that high - ever! It puts me a good 10 points above the other networks which certainly can't hurt.

Which of all those things I did made the difference? I don't know. I was just going through everything I could to try to trigger something. In the "sucky" thread I mentioned above, I remember one person saying he took his MBP in for repairs, but the Apple store couldn't find anything wrong with it. But, somehow, they fixed the problem. That meant that there was some way of messing with the settings that would trigger something that would serve to fix the problem. So I was just stabbing at everything, hoping I'd get lucky. And it looks like I did!

I tried to remember everything I did as best I could. Maybe someone else experiencing the same problem can try each thing one at a time to determine which is the one that fixes it. But at least this should narrow things down a bit and give some hope that this can be fixed if you fiddle with the settings.

This post is actually a bit of a test. Last night, each time I wrote a post, I'd lose the connection. I wonder if it's going to lose the connection or work this time? Edited: It worked! :D

Appletalk can be a bit chatty at times, so it could have been helping the problem. Really everything these days uses standard TCP/IP so I would suggest just sticking with that. I know I have had many ups and downs with my WiFi every other system update, security update, or Airport update. A few times updates have completely knocked my WiFi support off at work. The weird things is, sometimes it will do it to the PPC based Macs and other times the Intel. So, some are affected some aren't. I know that our enterprise wireless solution at work is from Trapeze and they have been working with apple to smooth out any compatibility issues. Weird thing is, my Linksys router at home (WRT54GL) has never once dropped signal to any of my machines Mac or PC.

It's hanging again. :(

This is frustrating. Here's what I'm getting in my system.log. Does this tell anyone anything about what's causing the problem?

tlarkin, I do use TCP/IP. If I remember right, I had to turn on AppleTalk for my laser printer, but I can't remember why now. I just turned it off, and the internet is unaffected. When I get home, I'll see if it affects my ability to print.

Maybe I should just get one of the new Apple Extremes so I can take advantage of the faster connection. I'm going to want one in my home anyway.

I have never had AppleTalk turned on, so that's not the problem. And I am a Mac n00b, so don't know the distinction between 'Express' and 'Extreme'; are these base stations, or client cards? If base station, I am using neither and see this problem.

"Repeated transitions for interface en1" means your wifi is winking in and out. There are other indications of this in the log.

"'/usr/sbin/lookupd'[2117]: exited abnormally: Hangup" is a profound error of a core system service, which then automatically restarts. lookupd is the system 'information spreader-arounder'. Part of its job is caching DNS (internet name) lookups, so this could just be a reaction to the wifi problem, although for it to crash over this is disturbing. The AppleTalk and rtmsg errors are just reactions to the wifi problem. Certainly turn off AppleTalk.

We need to be looking close to the wifi interface, like its driver, the microcode loaded into it, and the wifi hardware. We need more detailed logging of the wifi interface, but since I am new to Mac I don't know how to do that.

Checking my logs I got lots of
... while running HenWen, but not since even though I've lost connexion.

So, to summarize, so far we know the problem is not:
- the 10.4.10 update, or any other update you haven't done yet. (you don't mention your system rev)
- AppleTalk.

If you could tell us what you mean by Express and Extreme, maybe we could eliminate base station as the culprit.


As an aside, interestingly, checking my System log I find that my system is using SafeSleep to Hibernate, rather than just suspending. I'd thought about installing SafeSleep, but it looks like it now comes with the OS. It means that when you close the lid, it puts the whole system state which is in RAM, into a disk file and practically turns off. As opposed to Suspend, which just shuts down some things and keeps the system state in RAM. Hibernate will last much longer without mains.

Airport Extreme Base Station - Specs

Airport Express Base Station - Specs

Trevor

Ah good, thanks trevor. So she is talking about base stations. But how would you differentiate when you mean to describe the Airport client card?

Well she's having trouble with an Express and I'm having trouble with a Belkin pre-N base station. I wonder what base stations others have, who are having this problem?

Needless to say, before reporting disconnect problems please do a wifi scan with a tool like Kismac, to make sure the problem is not just a neighbor using the same channel as you. If they are, change to an unused channel and it may well clear the problem up.

Understand that wifi uses a military technology called "spread spectrum", which means that when you set a router to channel 6, it is actually using channels 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, all at the same time. When you set it to channel 1 it then uses two channels below one, plus 2 and 3. Channel 11 uses 9, 10, and 11, and two above 11. This means that on your base station you should only ever choose channels 1, 6, or 11. Never set it to any other channels, so as not to interfere with other users using other channels.

Generally, "Airport Card" means 802.11b card. "Airport Extreme Card" means 802.11g or 802.11n draft card. For the last several years, PowerBooks, MacBook Pros, iBooks, and MacBooks have had the client 802.11x chipset built in, so they are not really cards anymore. However, the cards are an optional install in some computers such as Mac Pros. Apple doesn't make it very easy to buy that optional card for the Mac Pro as far as I know, though.

Trevor

Ah, very good, thanks Trev.

I turned it off the other day. It's still off.

System rev? Are you referring to my System Version? I am running 10.4.10. Please see my sig.

Trevor did a great job of explaining the differences, but I need to report that it has happened on my Extreme base, as well. So that means the problem manifests itself in both, the Airport Express bases and Airport Extreme bases. My Airport Extreme is the older "spaceship" model, not the newer model.

One thing that I've noticed in my logs is a little app I run that updates the weather is a good indicator as to how often I lose connection with the internet.

I am finding that I lose connection much less often when connected to my Extreme Based network. The difference between the two (other the obvious base differences) is that my Express network is much stronger, but can see at lease 7 other networks, 2 of those being rather strong connections with 1 sometimes being even stronger than my own network. But the Extreme network is about 1/2 as strong and only on occasion displays a 2nd network.

However, BOTH networks have been up and running for at least 8 months without any problems when using my old PowerBook G4. The problem did not begin until I started using this MBP. So it has to have something to do with the MBP itself, be that software or hardware.

I found something else to try. From the thread, MacBook Pro only able to logon to some networks., ThreeBKK gave a link to a firmware update. I've ran that to see if it'll work or not.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macos...te2007004.html

It might take a little while before I can be sure if it's working or not since the problem isn't as frequent on the network I'm using right now.

Why wasn't this firmware update automatically listed in Software Update? How am I supposed to discover these updates?

Well, as you can see in that thread, I installed that update and my MBP "seems" to be very snappy rendering webpages but that could just be luck, in that connection speeds here are generally garbage but sometimes speed up. More testing needed.

Vicki .. exactly the same problem here
 

Hi Vicki ... I have exactly the same problem as you .. and pretty much the same setup ..
I can provide the following information to the problem:
* Makes no difference if I use Extreme or Express ... My internet connection still sputters.
* I also have a Dell Inspiron ... it works flawlessy with the Airport network.
* I live in an apartment, so, there are lots of wireless signals around. There is one available to me that does not require a network password .. Guess what! The MBP works flawlessly with it .. Its a dLink! And its signal strength is ONLY 2 or 3 bars!!!! Go figure.

Now, before anyone tells me its an interference problem, please note that I have tried all of the interference fixes out there ... nada ... no difference ..

Like you ... I try something, and its okay for a while, .. but, within an hour, its back.

Did you ever get a solution? If so, let me know ... I am considering ditching all the airport stuff ..

Eric