Help me bring back my wifi!
December 7, 2009 8:15 AM   Subscribe

I'm having wifi troubles with my MacBook, and the lack of connectivity for the weekend gave me the shakes. Help me before the withdrawal gets worse!

The gist: WPA2 Personal network, running on a Netgear router. Been up for a while, played nice with my MacBook (running Snow Leopard) and my wife's XP laptop. Over the weekend, the router rebooted during the setup of a new Roku, and my MacBook abruptly dropped the network; since then, I haven't been able to reconnect, just getting the standard "There was an error trying to join the network [SSID]. Please try again later."

My wife's XP machine still connects with no trouble.

As nearly as I can tell, it seems like my laptop sees the network, but can't recognize it as WPA2 Personal; when I try to connect, the SSID shows up in my saved networks as WPA2 Enterprise. Editing one of the Enterprise instances to Personal with the correct login information doesn't help, nor does manually adding a new Personal instance.

Other things I have tried:

- rebooting the router (multiple times)
- deleting the keychain storing network passwords
- deleting the plist storing network prefs
- deleting and re-adding the entire Airport connection in my network prefs
- reinstalling and updating Snow Leopard (update done with the MacBook connected by ethernet)

Any thoughts/suggestions/ideas?
posted by COBRA! to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Have you tried changing the SSID of the router and seen if that works with your MacBook?
Also do you have a default SSID? Perhaps there is another router that the Macbook is confusing itself with.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 8:33 AM on December 7, 2009


Oh, Netgear, ye of the tiny price and crappy performance.

Search the old questions on AskMe for stories, but I know in my own personal experience troubleshooting networks for friends and family, the problematic router always turns out to be a NetGear piece somewhere in the chain. I had one of my own, too (for about a week). They seem especially disinclined to work well with Macs.

I'm not saying tossing the router should be step one, but if you get to the point where you are replacing it, stick with something safe, like a LinkSys/Cisco.
posted by rokusan at 8:40 AM on December 7, 2009


Response by poster: Have you tried changing the SSID of the router and seen if that works with your MacBook?
Also do you have a default SSID?


I haven't tried that yet, basically because I didn't want to have to upset the applecart with my wife's computer. But it does seem like a logical thing to try.

And the SSID's not default, so I don't think that's it.
posted by COBRA! at 8:51 AM on December 7, 2009


Have you flashed the router to the latest firmware?
posted by sharkfu at 10:21 AM on December 7, 2009


Response by poster: No, I'll give that a whirl as well.
posted by COBRA! at 10:25 AM on December 7, 2009


Response by poster: New SSID did the trick. Muchas gracias.
posted by COBRA! at 4:51 PM on December 7, 2009


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