Airport Extreme Base locks up needs reset when certain wireless devices con

Question

Level 1

4 points

Airport Extreme Base locks up needs reset when certain wireless devices con

My Airport Extreme has been running fine for over a year now (Firmware 7.3.2). This week my son brought home an Eee PC 1000 with its default OS install. With in a minute my Airport locked up hard and all network connections died including ethernet. Airports green light was still on. I had to power off the Airport base and re-start it and all was fine. But this problem is fully reproducible when ever I connect the Eee PC to the wireless network. After searching the net I have found that this is a known problem and may be related to other peoples trouble with similar lock ups on this device. This seems to be something Apple must respond to soon. An outside device connecting should not be able to lock up an entire wireless network. I am thinking taking the Eee PC to my local Apple Store to see if it can be reproduced there also.

Dual G5, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Nov 15, 2008 5:52 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Nov 15, 2008 4:41 PM in response to Zoraster

Just got a MSI Wind netbook. Never had any problems with my AirPort Extreme until I started wireless to the Wind. Will work for a few minutes then loose connection to the wind and ethernet connection to my Mac. Green light stays on. I can even Traceroute out and go 20 hops before they go blank. Always 20 hops. I've hard reset. I've shut it off and restarted many times. I've given up on the AirPort and disconnected. Wired directly into my cable modem now.

Reply

Answer 2

jrhzep

Level 1

0 points

Nov 17, 2008 11:45 PM in response to Zoraster

I've had the same issue with my MSI Wind. It renders the wireless functionality in the Airport Extreme Base mostly useless. ICMP seemingly works, but I'm unable to do much else and it required a hard reset + power removal in order to make it work again.

Reply

Answer 3

bcp10415

Level 1

0 points

Nov 18, 2008 5:06 PM in response to jrhzep

I had the same problem with an MSI Wind locking up my Airport Extreme N base Station. I believe it was related to the WPA2 personal encryption as removing all WiFi security allowed the combo to work well.

This points to a bug in the AEBS, but I prefer having a protected network. As I use the AEBS for printer sharing & time machine backups, I didn't want to swap the router.

I ended up voiding my Wind's warranty and swapped the Wind's Realtek mini-pci wifi with a Dell Trumobile 1500 card. Using this Broadcom based wifi card, the Wind works great both in XP and OS X 10.5.5 with my AEBS.

Reply

Answer 4

Nov 21, 2008 1:39 PM in response to Zoraster

Hi, I bought an eeePC 901 the same time I bought my extreme, so I thought the extreme was faulty, and so did apple. I'm on my second extreme now and it was locking up again. I'm going to run it for 48 hours without the eeePC on, and see if any of the faults re-occur.

Not good if I can't run my 901 on the extreme...

Reply

Answer 5

jrhzep

Level 1

0 points

Nov 21, 2008 8:11 PM in response to Mooseman999

My AEBS has worked flawlessly with my other laptops (Acer Ferrari with a Broadcom WiFi adapter as well as a MacBook Pro) for the past few days with the MSI Wind off. Seems pretty clear it's an issue with the base station. Hopefully Apple can come up with a firmware update soon for this issue.

Reply

Answer 6

mrklaw

Level 1

0 points

Nov 22, 2008 3:21 AM in response to jrhzep

I recently bought a samsung NC10 netbook, and am having problems accessing the network (using time capsule as wireless access point). Using WPA2

I'm connecting to my ADSL modem which is acting as router. It has wireless b/g but its turned off as I'm using the time capsule.

Is it worth trying the wireless on the modem for the netbook, bypassing the time capsule? Then I could use N only mode on the TC for my MBP/appleTV?

Reply

Answer 7

Nov 24, 2008 3:25 AM in response to mrklaw

May be worth a try, please let us know if its a success. I tried to run my eeePC on my Netgear wireless (sharing it with all my others) and that managed to take the AEBS down too. I may try what you are doing, I'll run a wireless N network for one set of equipment, and a different B/G network for the rest.

MM

Reply

Answer 8

mrklaw

Level 1

0 points

Nov 25, 2008 10:38 AM in response to Mooseman999

lol - typical.

Tried turning wireless on on my modem, which then promptly broke it.

Went out and bought a newer modem/router which supports WPA2 (old one didn't) and the NC10 seems fine with it. Macbook pro/appleTV/time capsule using the old network switched to 5GHZ N

Reply

Answer 9

Nov 25, 2008 5:08 PM in response to Zoraster

Just got my MSI Wind today, got it connect to my Airport extreme for a minute or so and then it locked up the airport. Even systems that are wired into it couldn't get on the net, though it was still showing a green status light. Unplugged router, retried several times, same results. Never would have guessed this would be a problem!

Reply

Answer 10

bcp10415

Level 1

0 points

Nov 25, 2008 5:14 PM in response to eriqthegeek

That makes quite a few of us with the same Wind / AEBSn lock up scenario.

In my case disabling WPA2 on the AEBS allowed the Wind to work.

Just to document this further, can you test disabling WPA if you have it enabled?

Reply

Answer 11

Zoraster Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 26, 2008 2:49 AM in response to bcp10415

I bet the common denominator would be the wireless card and linux driver used. My sons EEE PC 1000 has the RaLink RT2790 Wireless 802.11n

I have to look at my sons netbook to get the wireless driver info. He is currently running Ubuntu-e on it. The lock up of the AEB was happening with both Xandros and Ubuntu.

Reply

Answer 12

Nov 26, 2008 3:07 AM in response to Zoraster

Actually, in my case I'm running WinXP SP3. I'm going to try playing around with the WPA settings when I get back from work tonight.

Reply

Answer 13

Nov 26, 2008 9:08 AM in response to eriqthegeek

me too, on XP SP3, its the wireless card.

Reply

Answer 14

Nov 26, 2008 3:24 PM in response to bcp10415

I tried disabling WPA and while I was able to connect the Wind without crashing the router, the internet connectivity on the Wind was very flaky.

I've actually been getting frustrated with my Extreme for awhile because every couple of days DNS queries to the router just stop working and I have to reset the router.

Anyway .... I pulled the trigger on a Linksys WRT160N router, and the Wind is working great with it.

Reply

Answer 15

Staxrod

Level 1

5 points

Dec 9, 2008 7:35 AM in response to eriqthegeek

I started a similar thread here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1811592&tstart=0

I dont use any WPA or similar, so turning off WPA is doing nothing to me. Airport Extreme just stops working as soon as the MSI is connected.

Reply