Reselecting local wireless network

May 16, 2009 2:35 PM

A friend of mine has a 1 Ghz Apple TiBook. He has to reselect his local wireless router in the wireless menu each time the laptop sleeps or is rebooted. What's the fix for this?

The problem mentioned is a bit of a nuisance. The Airport connection to the local 2wire router doesn't stay set. The connection in OS X 10.4 keeps getting lost somehow, so the user has to go to the wireless menu and reselect his local network each time the system sleeps or reboots.

We fiddled with it a bit to no great success. What else could I try or look at to get this working right?

posted by diode to computers & internet (7 comments total)

It's been a while since I used 10.4, but look in the Network preference pane, select you wireless connection and then "More Info" or details and see if you can set it to "Remember wireless networks I join." Then it will look for that network first. If there are already several networks in the list, drag his to the top or delete the other ones. My computer did this for a while because it was trying to go through a whole list of networks to join before it got to mine. Rearranging the order solved the problem.
posted by Science! at 2:40 PM on May 16

My MBP did the same thing when it was running Tiger. It didn't matter what WAP the MBP was connected to, the connection never survived a sleep. After changing to Leopard that behavior stopped. It might be worth upgrading.
posted by jet_silver at 2:44 PM on May 16

I had the same problem with my MacBook. I eventually reinstalled the OS for some other reason and it fixed that issue.
posted by john m at 2:48 PM on May 16

This happened to a friend of mine whose PowerBook originally ran Panther (or even Jaguar, maybe) and was upgraded to Tiger. She never had a Network Preferences pane that looked right--the settings for remembering networks and joining preferred networks stayed like it was in the previous version of the OS. She also couldn't enter some types of WPA passwords, which was how we first noticed the problem.

A clean install of Tiger was recommended on a forum, which fixed all the problems and they never came back, so you might want to try that. I think clean installs are fun but YMMV.
posted by bcwinters at 2:53 PM on May 16

When I had this problem (1.25Ghz machine), the fix was to delete all the wifi-related passwords from my keychain and let them be recreated when I connected.
posted by olecranon at 6:24 PM on May 16

This is probably obvious, and something you've already tried, but: I had this problem for awhile and it turned out that my home network was no longer first in the list of preferred networks. You can change the order in the advanced section of network preferences.
posted by JenMarie at 1:06 AM on May 17

Seconding olecranon: nuke all the wifi keychains - which is the mac password program in the utilities folder in the application folder. You will have to do this for both the user & for the system. Keychain calls the user "login" and you need to get keychain to show keychains (pictured in the bottom left of this pic) and the screen should look like this. Go through and delete everything that looks related to the airport.

RESTART machine. You will have to reconnect to the network & supply new credentials. If that doesn't work the next easiest solution is to over write the OS.
posted by zenon at 9:18 PM on May 18