Authenticated/Authenticating/Authenticated/Authenticating
A few months back, no matter what I did, I could never get the Mac to connect without me manually entering the password. I don't know why, and didn't diagnose carefully.
Starting with 10.5.8, there does not exist any way to cause the Mac to connect successfully. The failure mode is fairly interesting. The status thing in Network Preferences alternates between "Authenticating" and "Authenticated (mumble mumble) 00:00:00". Several times a second. Forever.
There is no actual connection. No connection is formed. I am prompted for a password even though a perfectly good one is in the keychain. I have, among other things:
* Reinstalled from scratch. (But I copied in my home directory, and I think that contained the Poisoned Preference.)
* Tested on other machines. (They work fine, no problems.)
* Deleted possibly-relevant keychain items.
* Deleted every network setting.
* Really, no, deleted every last one of those files, completely, including the whole Keychain.
No matter what happens, I can't get this machine back into the state that every other Mac is in by default, where I can enter the configuration data for this network and the Mac can join the network. I have a Mini that works fine on this network, but I actually want my laptop working.
Any help, ANYTHING AT ALL, would be awfully useful. I have no attachment to any kind of stored network data, preferences, or settings, and if there were a command to run that would ABSOLUTELY ERADICATE every last trace that there has ever been any previous network configuration, so it'd be EXACTLY as though I had just opened a brand new Mac from the store, that would be SUPER AWESOME.
Because, basically, if I don't have any of my stuff on a machine, it's fine, but something in ~/Preferences seems to make it blow up, and I don't know what, where, or how.
I've lost a full 16+ hours to this now. All I want is to eradicate the settings so that it will act just like a freshly opened Mac, because I've tried repeatedly on such Macs, and it works perfectly without hassle with the same settings.
Possibly useful from system.log:
Aug 11 06:03:15 laptop-seebs-net airportd[961]: AirPort off, bailing - GetPower() = off (0)Aug 11 06:03:18 laptop-seebs-net kernel[0]: AirPort: Link Up on en1
Aug 11 06:03:18 laptop-seebs-net eapolclient[964]: SecKeychainFindGenericPassword failed, -25300Aug 11 06:03:18 laptop-seebs-net eapolclient[964]: en1: failed to retrieve password from keychain
Aug 11 06:03:18 laptop-seebs-net eapolclient[964]: en1 START
Aug 11 06:03:19 laptop-seebs-net System Preferences[599]: Error: Apple80211Scan() error 16
Aug 11 06:03:19 laptop-seebs-net airportd[961]: Error: failed to snag beacon
Aug 11 06:03:19 laptop-seebs-net System Preferences[599]: Error: __performScan() EBUSY, try again in a secAug 11 06:03:19 laptop-seebs-net eapolclient[964]: SecKeychainFindGenericPassword failed, -25300
Aug 11 06:03:19 laptop-seebs-net eapolclient[964]: en1: failed to retrieve password from keychain
Etcetera.
I have no idea why it would be failing to retrieve the password from the keychain. I've deleted everything, recreated everything, set unrestricted access, set restricted access -- in short, I've done the top thirty or so things that were previously recommended.
Mac, Mac OS X (10.5.8), I have a lot of them.