Self-assigned IP address problem - My solution

I am new to this board and created an ID just to write this post. When I searched for this self-assigned IP problem, I found almost 1 million results on Google so obviously I am not alone.

I have this problem off and on on the wireless network at home with a Netgear router. It has never happened at my office with a D-Link router. Never happened at Starbucks or McDonalds (yes, they all offer WiFi here). But it happened at one Pizza Hut and it also at Christchurch airport about a week ago.

Deleting one of the plist files worked once at home many months ago but this week nothing worked. My Mac usually goes back to normal by itself after I "****" it out at other WiFi networks but not this time. As a last resort, I asked my brother (our family's I.T. guy) to change the router as I had not tried that fix. He didn't do it but a day later, he gave me to oddest solution that worked in a blink of an eye.

The solution? Key in a wrong password!!!

1) Go to Keychain Access, delete the keychain for the problematic network.

2) Connect back to the network

3) Enter a WRONG password that is similar to the right one. For example, if your password is Apple123, try APPLE123. You should still connect to the network and get a self-assigned IP.

4) Repeat Step 1. To be safe, you might want to re-boot now. I did but probably didn't have to!

5) Repeat Step 2

6) Enter the right password

I'm not all that techie so all I understood from what he said was:

1) It's probably a non-Apple router bug

2) It's a hex key problem. The password wasn't being encoded/decoded properly so the router wasn't assigning the computer an IP address. Wasn't even reading the password which is why I could connect with a wrong one.

He deduced that from reading a post from a guy in Spain who thought he had carelessly entered the wrong password and was wasting the community's time with his posting. I had read that post a couple of days ago too! But obviously I thought the Spaniard had just entered the wrong password and there was no fix for me to try out. My brother is a genius!

I guess it then makes sense why fixes like:

1) Disabling the firewall

2) Deleting preference lists

3) Deleting keychains

4) Changing the router

5) Renewing DHCP lease

6) Resetting the router

...have worked for many people and not others. None of them actually fix the cause of the problem. Having searched for 3 days, I could not find the REAL reason why this happened. Personally from all I have read, I think it must be a hex key problem with Netgear and Linksys routers. I see those 2 names mentioned a **** of a lot. Maybe it's another one of those gadgets built more for PCs that don't work perfectly with Macs all the time. We used to have an Apple Airport Extreme base station but that got fried by lightning. It was not cheap.... So technically, it really isn't Apple's problem. I think if we used an Apple router, we wouldn't have a self-assigned IP address. Maybe that's why they haven't "fixed" the problem after so many years.

Anyway, let me know if my brother's fix worked for you.

This is my good deed for the weekend! Goodnight....!