Q: Lion WiFi Connection Problem

You could also try the script I posted. It has worked for everyone that has tried it. It's posted earlier in this thread - it just pings something out on the Net every five seconds.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17588807/pingApple.app.zip

The fact that network traffic is "fixing" the problem, really starts to make it feel like the DHCP renewal code is not working correctly.  In your router, check what the expiration of the leases are from your routers perspective, and see if that time frame has any relationship to when the connections outbound stop working. 

It just seems like there is something about the router relationship with the Mac, since some people are fixing the problem with new routers.  Given that "ping" seems to fix the problem, that tells me that there is a network traffic timeliness issue.  Some people say that their wifi connection is up, but they can't use the internet.  That would be a "I don't have a valid IP address" issue. 

So, when the network stops working, what do you see when you do

ifconfig -a

from a terminal window, shell prompt?  How does that differ from what you see when it is working?  If you'll run the command line,

ifconfig -a >working.txt

when it's working, and then

ifconfig -a >nonworking.txt

diff working.txt nonworking.txt

when it is not working, the "diff" command will show you what's different.  If you turn your wifi off, and do the

ifconfig -a >noton.txt

and then compare that to working and nonworking as well, with diff, that might be instructional.

If some people will do that, and post their results here, it might make it much more obvious what is happening, and why it happens to some people and not others.

I SURRENDER!!! Icalled Apple tech support and had them email me the steps to Upgrade to Snow Leapord.  I told her I used to tell my friends that MAC's just work and I'm sorry to say that I can no longer say that. 

She was very nice and emailed me the link to start the process. 

I'm going to work in a couple of days and will be gone for a while so this process will have to wait until I come home next year.  I will have to deal with this problem for a little while longer unless by some miricale Apple comes up with a fix, but I'm not holding my breath.  I have been using MACS now for 10 years and always looked forward to the latest OS update, but once I get Snow Leapord back I most likely will never change until Apple no longer supports it.

Happy computing:(

Has anyone who hasn't had a solution with all the reset of WiFi properties and all the other reload and change driver steps, had good success with just doing a "ping" as described a few posts back?  I'm really curious, if this works for anyone who hasn't had any relief any other way.

gphonei, no it didn't work for me on it's own.   It wasn't until I did a bunch of the other fixes.  I have been running for 5 days now with no drops.  I stopped running anything Ping scripts after the second day.

Okay, that's an interesting data points.  Anyone else have any yes it works or not it doesn't experiences to share?  If you found something that did work, if you could mention that too, that might help to get some more data together after all this time.  Some people have had solutions that worked for a while, but then stopped working.  Others seem to have found things that worked for some time of the day, but not other times of the day.

For me, nothing other than a ping worked. On several machines, it has worked reliably for over two weeks. So it seems my experience is different still. I have all Apple access points (airport extreme and expresses).

When disconnected networking looks normal, just as if I manually turned off the router and the WiFi connection is down but Airport is on. Using wired to the airport extreme fixes the issue as well, do I am still on the fence about this being a DHCP issue. It seems like a WiFi bug is the problem and DHCP issues are more of a symptom.

Yeah, it might not be a DHCP lease issue, but something is happening for some people when they generate continuous traffic.  Either that is causing the problem to fix itself sooner, if the driver is faulting or otherwise failing, or it affects some resource management that is based on time, or packet count, or memory use.

The casual user isn't really aware of all the technical aspects of what they are experiencing.  There are simple layers of technology involved, and there are various ways to analyse which layer is most likely the problem, or at least eliminate other layers from consideration.

Ping and other continued network traffic, just make it feel like something about resource or connectivity management is at issue.  Of course, there are many people that don't seem to ever find a solution that works for them, except for using the ethernet cable.   The fact that this solves the problem, for everyone, can make it feel like its totally a "WiFi" layer problem, for sure.

Apple is just going slow enough on fixing this to make it feel like they are finding the problem intractable to analyze, and that's why I continuely get on here and ask people to call Apple Care support as many times as they can, and report any updates, including their solution to Apple, so that there might be a better chance of helping the developers/support teams find the real cause and get a fix out.

gphonei, as I said before nothing worked for me. And when the connection drops it does not come back even if I use a cable. For now I can't call Apple 'cause I'm n Angola, for Christmas I will be back in Italy, I have another wireless connetion there, be sure that if I'll have the same problem I will call them.

The ping system didn't work the first time I used it, but know it is almost three hours that it's up and running with the ping active. I also left the MBP unuttended for about 1 hour, usually it locks; let's see what happens.

Wow - I think I just might have found a temporary solution that works for me.

I've been struggeling with this issue for the past couple of months, and I think I have tried almost everything suggested in this an all the other threads. Not even pinging worked for more than an hour or so.

Yesterday (in lack of any other ideas) I disabled the firewall in my router - and voila! No problems for the past 24 hours...

I know this is not a feasible solution in the long run, it might help finding the root of the problem.

I can say also that ping does not work..it may stabilize the connection ..but mine still drops to no route to host ........How were u able to disable Firewall? I am not tech savy so a discription would be helpful...I am on a mac ....thanks in return for any help..........Really frustrated ..now going on 4 weeks!

@Rico1111 - That really depends on your router, but usually you can login by writing the IP address in your browser and use the credentials provided by by your ISP or just some standard admin/password set by the manufacturer.

Which router do you use?

Zyxel p600 if that means anything? It is provided through Earthlink of which I run my airport through to connect for DSL connection.

I have had 2 hours with ping on and no interuption ...but am not sure this is related because it did have a few no route to host signals but they came and left ..who knows ! it is unstable and I am pretty much done with trying to figure anything out...have tried deleting cache and re-setting pram ..all suggestions have been tried. Does anyone know ..Is it possible to just revert back to snow leapord if you have the disc? None of lion has been beneficial to me it changed my Time Capsul ..so I had to delete everything in the 4 years of backups because after installing lion it gave me a choice of not using or deleting old backups to start new...and my internet connection is really bad ..also the new itunes with Icloud ..which Is why I downloaded lion to begin with...is not reliable to play music or depend on ..my pictures taken somewhere were never on my machine when I got home and sometimes never showed up......all of what Apple is promoting about this new system is  a lie ...Don't get me wrong I am an Apple lover ..have always hated windows or any other computer and have always sworn by Apple products......... but I feel they need to release some sort of way for people to get out of this quagmire ..because I think this is going to hurt their reputation  big time ....Thank God Steve isn't here to see this fiasco.

okay  I lied ..just went into my wifi and added more #s that are advised by Earthlink for DNS and it worked right away after my ping stopped working due to route to host down signal......so maybe having more #s in the DNS to be able to connect is something needed?  I am going to shut ping and see how long the connection lasts.