Airport problem

Good for you. I'm glad your problem was resolved. But you can't argue that there are thousands of others (possibly more) who upgraded and are still having a wifi dropout issue of some sort because of Leopard. Read through all the posts of the people who's issues weren't resolved. We can all at least agree that APPLE needs to ACKNOWLEDGE this problem exists and they are looking into it. I am slowly losing faith in them after 20 faithful years...

B

Unfortunately, the only times I've seen acknowledgment of a problem is in response to press/media queries. I have no idea why this approach is taken, but it frustrates me to no end and I think it's going to be counter productive for them in the long run.

Even when patches do surface, the notes seem to say little that's specific enough. This tends to lead to a lot of churn as users post their subjective theories on what was/wasn't included ("I'm sure it's louder now...", "I'm sure it's quieter...", "It seems brighter...", etc.).

I (and others) have been dealing with another, similar, situation with my iPhone. The Yahoo email performance has been terrible (silent data loss when sending email via Yahoo, and a practically useless "push" email function). After 6 months, silence from Apple and therefore no fix in sight. Really unacceptable and unimpressive in my view.

As much as I hate to say it, my love affair with Apple has become strained recently... <sigh>.

..same problem here, as soon as I open 2 tabs in Safari or Firefox the whole wireless connection breaks down and it only comes back after a reboot of the airport base station.

Only sitting one (!!!) meter after from the base station allows me to work regulary, 3 meters away from the station, no signal anymore. Guys, that´s ridicilous! And yes, I got a Powerbook G4......

another aspect to the problem is that osX flashes the airport card with new firmware when a new driver is available for the airport card version... like if you flash your DVD drive, that is normally very difficult to reverse, but it's possible.

from all the post i read i think the problem is in the airport firmware combined with something from the system that was installed before...

i used to have a bandwidth problem with my broadcom 4321 802.11n card on my macbook pro CD 2.0... i put it in my mbp on my own in order to get 802.11n capability and it worked, but there seemed to be a problem with the old driver and my bandwidth capped @ around 500kbyte/sec (not kbit!). apple released a firmware upgrade for the broadcom 4321 2 weeks after i put my card into my mbp, but apple did so because that card normally is in the mac pro and imac (i think, i'm sure on the mac pro, but not the imac). since then i never had a problem again!

but it could be that that firmware upgrade has somehow something to do with whats going on here, i don't mean that in the sense that that firmware is the fix, i mean it in the sense of that there's a conflict in osX and the particular driver for certain cards @ the time of the upgrade. the seems to be a correlation between those factors... since some people here were lucky enough to fix the problem deleting the cache files or changing certain aspects of how data enter or leaves the airport card...

i definitely doubt that it has anything to do with the wifi base stations... it is a firmware related thing with certain airports and their firmware and directly related to the firmware and caches that are on the mac @ the time of update...

Are you sure that it's flashed? I'm fairly certain that the firmware is loaded dynamically. If you boot back and forth between OS X and another OS (say Windows or Linux), the NIC gets initialized with whatever firmware is contained within their drivers.

If you join ADC, I'm pretty sure there is more specific information on what changes in addition to the potential to access debug or test versions of drivers, etc.

Pretty much every product on the planet works the same way. You don't get your TV schematic or firmware access unless your an authorized tech. You don't get your car service bulletins (which it's AMAZING how many issues there are with cars we never find out about) unless you're a car mechanic.

Pretty much EVERYTHING (yes, even some toasters) run with a small CPU and an operating system and I have yet to receive 'full disclosure' for any of them.

Is this your personal network?

If so, try doing a ping flood of average sized or large packets at your router interface and see if it does the same thing (dies). Use control-C to break out of it.

Err:~ eb$ sudo ping -s 1400 -f 192.168.15.1
PING 192.168.15.1 (192.168.15.1): 1400 data bytes
....^C
--- 192.168.15.1 ping statistics ---
3322 packets transmitted, 3319 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.059/2.226/12.621/1.061 ms

BTW - notice the 3000+ packets sent within just a couple seconds with 0% packet loss (the 3 missing were in-flight). This was over airport - so not everyone is having issues all the time (yes, I have had some).

very sad that apple did no t bring any solution for this problem yet. this operative system just brought me problems for $129, i would stick back to tiger and recommend no one to buy leopard until this issue is solved

mreckhof wrote:

...Pretty much every product on the planet works the same way. You don't get your TV schematic or firmware access unless your an authorized tech. You don't get your car service bulletins (which it's AMAZING how many issues there are with cars we never find out about) unless you're a car mechanic...

All I can tell you is that's not been my experience. As a developer for an Un*x OS company I was responsible for generating patch notes, and the only time we wouldn't provide fix summaries was generally if the fix addressed a security problem (where that information could be used against folks on pre-patched versions of the software)

In my experience outside of that role, dealing with other vendor patches, I generally see more context in patch notes than I recall seeing in Apple's. Where Apple will say "Bug fixes", leading to the user speculation I mentioned previously, other companies seem more forthcoming. The reason is simple... in many environments the last thing you want to do is install a patch that's unnecessary... "if it aint broke, don't fix it" rules for - oddly enough - risk mitigation reasons. Without clear patch notes how would you know which patches are needed, and which are not essential?

To be clear, I don't want to know how the bugs were fixed... just which bugs/symptoms were fixed. For example... when and if the iPhone patch is released to fix the flaky Push email performance, I'd love to see something in the patch notes to alert me to the fact that a push email fix is included... rather than myself and others having to wait a day or so, post restart, to figure out if the issue remains or not.

Let me know the next time you see a software/firmware patch for a toaster 🙂

haha... google out netbsd and toaster. I'm pretty sure someone did it quite a while back just because it runs on everything else.

http://www.embeddedarm.com/~joff/ - i'm sure there's some patches between the original and -current at the time of that writing.

Did you take a look at the security update today? That's about as detailed as I ever see them from apple...

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307179

Message was edited by: mreckhof

Jon/Tokyo wrote:
One question, where is the link to write directly to Apple? I rather suspect that that is the real way we should all - 29,000 and counting - be letting them know how we truly feel.

As I've said before, the way to let Apple know of your concerns is to open an AppleCare ticket on the issue.

A purchase of Leopard comes with 90 days' worth of free technical support, so the fact that you're running it on an older machine doesn't matter.

AppleCare calls are tracked and bug severity assigned accordingly, but as I and a few others have pointed out, bugs usually can't be fixed without reproducing them, and this issue is likely proving to be terribly difficult to reproduce as it's not as simple as a universal failure when trying to talk to say an AEBS from a G4 iMac.

I'll add my info and name to the list having wifi issues with Leopard. I have a 15" MacBook Pro 2.16 core2duo running 10.5.1. My home network is a netgear wgr614 802.11g. At this point I've disconnected every other pc I had on the network. I did a lot of speedtests trying to figure out what was wrong. I'm not sure f it's not my router but I didn't notice an issue until I installed leopard. If I have anything else plugged into the router the connection becomes useless. webpages don't display, torrent downloads stall, etc. With nothing plugged in and only the MBP connected wirelessly I get good ping and down and up speeds from speedtest.net. but eventually everything stalls out. I have to turn off airport in the menubar and turn it back on and boom everything starts working again for a few minutes. I hope this is an issue with leopard and apple fixes it soon, I was really close to buying a new router. Now I'm just confused. I'm also submitting a bug report.

Hey everyone experiencing this issue still, please submit your complaints and issues regarding wifi dropout issues here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

An AppleCare tech told me to have everyone submit it via that link so they can properly diagnose and resolve this recurring issue. Let's see if they listen!

Regards,
B

Do note that comments posted to the feedback link are analyzed for future enhancements, new development, etc. and aren't the best way for data concerning a bug to be submitted.

However, it can't hurt, either.

Something similar here, MBP 2.2, Leopard 10.5.1 with all updates installed. No funky stuff on this laptop. As I use the laptop on the road I visit many customers having wireless networks. With Tiger everything was just fine. With Leopard problems occur with some WLAN networks.

With one of my customers I am logged into two Ubuntu servers using appletalk and ssh. The wireless connection to those servers never breaks. But within the same network also a Windows DNS server as well as an internet gateway. Very frequently the connections to those two devices break. For instance, if I type

ping 192.168.1.1 &
ping 192.168.1.2 &
ping 192.168.1.5 &

(.1 = gateway, .2 = dns server, .5 = ubuntu box), then I'll see all boxes respond while suddenly the .1 and/or the .2 drops, only to get back after up to 20 minutes (didn't time it as I'm too ****** off by this bug).

Tried to fix the problem with the ifconfig en1 mtu 1492 trick mentioned above. Didn't work. Tried to disable the IPV6, didn't work. Did setup a separate profile for this location with all data entered manually, didn't work. Currently the only solution is to turn off the airport and turn it on again. It looks as if the airport is loosing the MAC addresses or something. This is ******* me off to a great extend as I just cannot work this way and I probably need to downgrade to Tiger or to go back to my Windows laptop.

If Apple would only admit there's a problem here and they're working on a fix, it would help already. But better: have it fixed as my MBP is turning into a joke at this customer: all other systems work flawlessly on the WLAN. There are also a couple of Macs in the house but they're all connected by wire. I don't have an Ethernet connection available and do rely on the WLAN connection - which should just work, didn't I pay Apple for it?