Airport Will Not Start

Any idea what "updateprefs" does in that same framework? Doesn't seem to want to give any command line help-- console says "must be root to run" and complains it's not running from launchd.

It sounds vaguely appropriate to what I need to do, but figured I'd ask before trying it.

No clue... but then again, I didn't know what airport did either until I tried it.

From the looks of those results, it appears to have taken your password and joined you up to the AP.

Let's try to now bring up IP manually as well.

Err:Resources eb$ sudo ifconfig en1 up
Err:Resources eb$ sudo ifconfig en1 192.168.15.33 netmask 255.255.255.0
Err:Resources eb$ sudo route add default 192.168.15.1

Replace the IPs with whatever is valid for your environment.

Well now, that's interesting:
"ifconfig: interface en1 does not exist"

'sudo ifconfig en1 create' came back with an invalid argument response. Of course the man page says nothing you do with ifconfig is permanent anyway, and to stick with Network Preferences.

FWIW, I tried redoing the 10.5.1 update but no luck...

Message was edited by: AnalogKid

mreckhof, Topher-- thanks again for walking me through this as much as you did. I learned alot in the process.

I do have it fixed now. I finally just restored the /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration directory from TimeMachine. Having tracked it down to the missing en1, I think NetworkInterfaces.plist was fouled up. I tried modifying it by hand once or twice, but couldn't get anything to take. Finally I just pulled the whole set of files up from backup and rebooted.

Looking back, I think what caused my problem was putting the Powerbook into target disk mode and using it to boot a downed Xserve. When I looked into that plist file and saw an en2 configured as a second ethernet port, that was kind of a clue...

So: while it's cool that you can boot an Xserve from your laptop drive, Leopard doesn't completely clean up after itself...

Also: TimeMachine is a godsend.

Ahh! I bet the XServ uses a diff nic type (i would hope so - something high performance) so it may have added an entry for its own nic bumping everything up by 1 so it got en0.

When you rebooted, guess things didn't go back the other way, so your en1 may have been en2.

Great info - Thanks!

I had the same problem, with the same errors turning up in the System Console (the ACInterfaceGetPowerPreference() invalid interface ones).

I still don't know what caused the problem, and it was very hard to find an answer. However, this thread pointed me in the right direction - the NetworkPreferences.plist and/or com.apple.airportPreferences.plist files which sit in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration were borked (not due to any XServe connection, as far as I know). It looked like a bogus entry had appeared in en1, making it look like I had two Airport cards... I have no idea where that came from.

Anyway, the simplest way I solved it was to delete these two files — OS X recreates them on restart. Now my Airport has come back!

Thanks.

I'm also seen the same problem, with the same source as the original person. That is, I am booting my MacBook Pro using a different system (in my case a Mac Pro) in target mode as the source disk. It's booted, wired network works, but wireless doesn't. The Mac Pro has two Ethernet interfaces, of course.

Looks like Leopard is missing some interface sanity checking on boot.

For me, deleting the Airport entry and creating a new one did the trick. I was then able to power on the Airport card and connect to my access point.

I had the same problem right now, i resolved logging in as another user and activating and deativating airport, when back to my user all was fine!