No wireless at home!

May 2, 2008 7:40 AM

Upgraded to Leopard, now I can't connect to my wireless at home, what gives?

I'm using AT&T DSL with their provided modem (a 2wire), and my connection is fine if I jack in directly. I can also connect using other wireless signals just fine, if not a little better than before, so I'm looking at the modem suspiciously... I've got my original settings written down from when I first set the modem up, but this is pretty much the extent of my knowledge!

posted by schwap23 to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Is your home WiFi secured at all, or is it completely open, or do you not know?
posted by kbanas at 7:46 AM on May 2, 2008

If the SSID (the name of the network) is set not to broadcast, you will need to choose "Join Other Network..." and type in the name of the network along with the associated security settings if applicable. Sometimes even if the SSID was set to broadcast this could still help you actually connect to it if you're having problems.
posted by genial at 8:02 AM on May 2, 2008

This was a very common problem in the early releases of Leopard. Make sure you have downloaded the most recent update, 10.5.2.
posted by mattbucher at 8:31 AM on May 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

While connected ("jacked in directly"), go to the modem's settings/status page (probably http://192.168.1.1 or .254) and see what you can learn?

You may find the info you need, such as SSID and such. You may also find the wireless feature is disabled: some modems automatically disable wireless if restarted with an ethernet cable connected.

(I don't know why.)
posted by rokusan at 8:39 AM on May 2, 2008

Select "Software Update..." in the apple menu. In the list of things to update, is there something like "Airport Update"?
posted by kamelhoecker at 10:02 AM on May 2, 2008

Thirding running all of the updates. Leopard has been more buggy than most of Apple's recent OS releases but 10.5.2 should solve the issue. Keep updating until it tells you that there are no more updates to install.
posted by arnicae at 10:45 AM on May 2, 2008

Are you using a Airport Extreme as your wireless router? If so, switch IPV6 to local only, and increase the timeout (mm - not in front of it, so not sure of the exact wording) of your WPA security key.

That worked for me.
posted by DandyRandy at 11:10 AM on May 2, 2008

You say that you can't connect to your wireless router, but how does that manifest itself? Do you see its name in the airport menu? If so, when you select it, does it prompt you for a password? Describing how it's failing would be helpful.

If you're not sure if the 2wire is even doing Wifi, try downloading iStumbler to see if it can detect a signal from it. (I assume that the 2wire is also your wireless access point and that there's not an apple airport base station in the mix. If so, please to clarify.)

But first, as has been advised above, do ensure that you're completely up-to-date and running 10.5.2 with all appropriate security patches and whatnot.
posted by mumkin at 11:58 AM on May 2, 2008

Updates, duh! Trying that as I type...
posted by schwap23 at 6:38 PM on May 2, 2008

Any luck?
posted by mumkin at 11:51 AM on May 3, 2008

My wife and I have both had similar wireless issues with 10.5.2, and we haven't found a solution. If you look on Apple's support discussion board, you'll find several long threads about this, with some suggestions that have worked for some people (but not for us, unfortunately). We've ended up stringing ethernet cables around the house and hoping for an improvement in 10.5.3...
posted by klausness at 3:34 PM on May 5, 2008

Well, we seem to have fixed our wireless issues by updating the firmware in our modem (a Linksys). It looks like Leopard may be a bit too picky about wifi routers, presumably expecting them to adhere more closely to standards than many of them actually do. Digging around on Apple discussion boards, I found a few people who had fixed their problems with a firmware update, so you might try to see if there's a firmware update available for your modem.
posted by klausness at 3:55 AM on May 10, 2008