Airpot doesn't like me

February 12, 2008 11:19 AM

Mac OSX filter: Help! Airport keeps kicking me off... and then hiding...

This is a new one (for me). I have a Macbook Pro and and an Airport Express wireless router, and I keep getting disconnected from my wireless network. I'll connect, and stay connected for a minute, maybe 2, maybe a few seconds, and then I get disconnected. When I try to connect again, I often don't see my network (I can see it maybe 1 out of every 5 or 6 tries). Sometimes it will say that it can't connect to the network, but sometimes it will connect. I am sitting RIGHT NEXT to my Airport Express. What the hell is going on? What can I do about it?

posted by AceRock to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Nobody seems to know what it actually does but when I used to have problems with my Airport Express I would check off "Use Interference Robustness" in the Airport menu in the top right corner. The problems went away by themselves after a couple of days, by the way, so I guess they could have had something to do with interference.
posted by sveskemus at 11:26 AM on February 12

This happens to me whenever I'm talking on the phone. If you have 2.4GHz devices such as cordless phones and microwave ovens, you'll want to at least enable Interface Robustness, but this won't completely eliminate the problem. Also try changing the channel around to see if you can find a happy slot.
posted by rhizome at 11:55 AM on February 12

Disable the thingy that controls IPv6, for one thing. There was one other thing I did, but I can't remember it off the top of my head and I'm not at home in front of the router right now.

I gleaned those two suggestions from the Apple discussion forum for the AE - lots of people having the same problem, and I fixed it trying some of the things people over there have had success with. Apple has been completely unresponsive regarding this apparently-widespread problem.
posted by DandyRandy at 12:07 PM on February 12

A lot of people have been having pretty serious wireless issues with Leopard. Even 10.5.2. You may want to check the apple support forums.
posted by mphuie at 12:09 PM on February 12

Further from the pertinent thread:

Manual Setup -> Advanced -> IPv6 -> change to 'Local-link only'.

The other thing I did was to change the WPA Timeout from 2 hours to 30 days.

No drops since I did the above - good luck!
posted by DandyRandy at 12:18 PM on February 12

I was having trouble with the latest firmware update for the airport, and rolling back to the previous version fixed my problem. Not sure if your situation is similar, but it might help.
posted by Chris4d at 2:46 PM on February 12