Hi guys!
I also got a new MBP (Leopard pre installed, so I cannot comment on Tiger performance) last October which used to connect fine to my g-wireless network at home. However, I also experienced timeout issues when connecting my laptop to wireless networks at friends places. Those issues always went away when you tried to connect a couple of times or after a reboot and my impression was that if you managed to connect once the issue would never reappear (probably that means as long as the access data is stored in the preferred networks control panel, but I never tested that. Just a hunch). I then bought a new wireless router (AVM Fritz!Box, for those who are interested, but they are, to my knowledge, only sold in Germany) and I went through all the mentioned errors. I had timeout errors, I had sudden loss of connection, heck it even told me that the passphrase would be wrong, which clearly wasn't the case. I switched back to g-mode, which helped a lot, but it still bothered me that I had paid money for a n router and I couldn't use it.
So I started to investigate. At first I remembered an episode where I tried to connect to a friende wireless network and I didn't work. Initialy I thought she had given me the wrong passphrase so we locked onto the routers configuration interface to look for the password. We never actually found out if the passphrase was wrong or not, because in the router interface the password was displayed in hex encoding. Copying and pasting that hex string suddenly made it work. Storing that passphrase in hex endoding makes perfect sense to the router because that is the way he remembers it and that is also the way the passphrase is used for authentication. So with that in mind I decided to give it a shot. I set my router back to n mode, converted my ASCII passphrase to a hex string, I used that hex string to log on to the network and voilá it works. So far I had it running for roughly 24 hours (pure running time) and I didn't have a single issue ever since!
So I am not saying this is a solution in all cases. It might be pure coincedence or just related to the specific hardware configuration I am using, but if some people would give this a try and report back here, we might find out if this is a possible work around for the time being.
For those of you who don't have a clue about ascii to hex conversion or don't have a clue about hex in general don't bother. I found a very nice web page (
http://www.string-functions.com/string-hex.aspx) which does all the hard work. You copy your passphrase and paste it in the upper box of the web page, you click 'Convert!' and recieve the corresponding hex string in the lower box.
Happy testing! And I am very interested in the feedback.
Message was edited by: poldiderjungdrache
Message was edited by: poldiderjungdrache
