Upgrade to 7.6 broke my network

Reiterating your advice to others on this forum: STAY AWAY from Airport base station 7.6 Firmware update!!! After 5 hours on the phone with Apple (even they had trouble restoring my network!), and an additional 5 hours troubleshooting on my own, I'm finally up and running again, with 7.6 successfully installed on all my Airport devices. Early in the process, when I asked the techs if there was a way to revert to the previous firmware, they said no; otherwise I would have done so in a heartbeat. Apple NEVER should have released such a problematic update. Maybe if they have enough complaints, they'll get the message? This has to be giving them a major headache! Too late for those of us faced with this aggravation, though. I now have exported configuration files for each of my devices and have taken screen shots of each of the Airport Utility tabs. Hopefully, I'll never need them, but... better safe than sorry!

Same problem. 7.6 broke my extended network. Time Machine showed up in Airport Utility after waiting a couple of minutes and is now working but I completely lost my Airport Express. Blinking orange and not showing in Airport Utility.

Hi there,

After the update to 7.6 my AExtreme restarted, but never came back in airport Utility. The AExtreme continuesly shows an orange light (according to the manual: completing a start-procedure) but that it has been doing for 30 minutes and still doesn't show up. I have tried a "soft"-reset (holding the reset button for 10 seconds) but nothing happened. I tried a "hard"-reset (disconnecting power for 15 minutes, holding reset button while reconnecting power) but still the same outcome. It starts with a green light just for a moment, but after that is turns orange again and stays like that.

Any help is greatly appreciated!! Because the mentioned solutions are not possible, as my Airport Extreme doesn't show in the Utility.

My Networkconfig:

An Airport Extreme Base Station (this is the one updated)

An Airport Express (this is blinking Orange, but is also not vissible in Airport utility anymore)

Imac 24" connected with cable

MacMini connected with cable

and a couple of wireless devices (Iphone, Ipad, MacBookPro)

Thank you for your help in advance.

Kind regards,

Marc

FWIW, I bit the bullet and tried the upgrade anyway and had no problems at all. According to Apple's KB on this firmware update, "It is recommended that AirPort Utility 5.5.3 or later be installed before updating to Firmware version 7.6."

I'm wondering if perhaps older versions of AirPort Utility are not installing the firmware update properly.

Not that. I used latest airport utility to do the update.

Does seem to affect mainly those with multiple base stations/ extended networks though so maybe you're fortunate in only having the one to update?

My main time capsule (reverted to 7.5.2) is now regularly dropping the wireless connection to my mac book pro now.

Sort it out Apple!

I finally sorted it out. What I did (that solved my problem) is disconnecting EVERYTHING from the AExtreme.

Shut down the IMac I wanted to configure the AExtreme on.

Left everything disconnected for about 15 minutes.

Connected the power supply to the AExtreme, with the Reset button pressed with a paperclip. Initialy with the same result (Orange light went on and stayed on).

After that I turned on the above mentioned IMac (with Wireless turned ON). Airport Utility started by itself telling me that there was something wrong with my AExtreme ("Duhu", was the first thing that came to my mind 🙂 ).

I went to "solving the problem with the AExtreme", where I was asked to connect the Cat-5 cable from my modem. I connected all the cables again to my AExtreme. Went on with the "solving the problem" -section in Airport Utility and ended up with a working network again.

In the end everything is working again as it was before, but this was a big "no,no" for Apple. Also looking at the many messages I read from people facing the same sort of problems after updating to 7.6.

Hope this helps anyone who is facing the same sort of problems.

Kind regards,

Marc

If you connect the Lan port of the Extreme Base Station to a computer (Mini or iMac) and power the Extreme up, does it show up in airport utility?

If you try the same procedure with the Express, does it show up in the Airport Utility.

My assumption is that you are running 5.5.3 of the Airport Utility.

I have an extremely complex network... a "roaming network." According to the senior tech who finally helped me, they typically charge to help with my kind of network. Huh??? They issue a mandatory update that blows up my network and then charge to help restore it??! They didn't, of course, because they'd already spent hours on the phone with me before passing me up to the highest level and by then, I think they took pity....

This was the way we ultimately got my network back:

I had to disconnect my Airport Extreme,my main Base Station, from everything and did the same with my 4 Airport Expresses. Basically, I completely rebuilt my network. First, I hard-reset my Extreme Base Station by pressing the reset button while at the same time re-connecting the power. When the amber light starts a rapid flash, release the reset. This restores the unit to factory settings. Re-opening Airport Utility, it will then recognize a new Extreme and take you through setting it up. The problem is, if you have a complex setup, you'll need to know the appropriate settings to select. If anyone here initially set up a pretty direct network, or knows what the specific settings should be, it should not be a problem, though. (The Firmware update made it impossible to even see units, which is why it was hard to correct any inaccurate changes the update had made.) After the extreme Base Station was restored, I unplugged my cable modem AND detached the coaxial cable connected to it. I waited a minute or so and then re-connected the cable and then the power. This restored the Internet signal that the update knocked out. Next I tested to be sure I could get on the Internet. When all looked right, I then went to my first Airport Express station, hard-reset it (same way as Extreme) and repeated the process as I did for the Extreme. Here you have to know whether your creating, joining or extending a wireless network and other details that range from simple to the complex. Again, if the networks involved here are fairly simple, there shouldn't be any problem. In my network, I have some Expresses connected by Ethernet and others connected wirelessly. I found that the ones connected by Ethernet had the most problems from the update. I hard-reset each of those and reinstalled them. The wirelessly-connected Expresses seemed to retain their appropriate settings, so I didn't hard-reset them, I first just tried re-connecting them. Once the Base Station and modem were up and running properly and the hard-wired units back to where they'd been, the remainder of my network set up quite easily. One other note: one of my Expresses connects to my DirectTV box, to allow for their multi-room & Internet access. If anyone uses an Express for this, those DTV boxes all need to be reset, as well. Whew! I hope this helps others here.

One last word that bears repeating: when my network was finally up and running smoothly again, I exported each device's configuration and filed it away for, what I hope will be, later use that will never come to pass. I named each file appropriately, with the word nightmare at the end to identify the date of the export! Good luck to everyone!

I have an Airport Extreme 4th gen and had no issues upgrading to 7.6. I use an attached hard drive formated to HFS+ that I use for time machine backups for two Lion and one Snow Leopard Macs and have a guest network as well. In addition to the previously mentioned macs, an iPhone 4S (iOS 5.0.1), an iPhone 3GS (iOS 5.0.1), an Alienware Windows 7 laptop, a Nintendo Wii and two iPad 2s (both iOS 5.0.1) also connect with no issues. Worked like a charm. Just posted this as a datapoint.

Message was edited by: rumpledoll

I did get my network back up after I dumped the prefs, and reset the Airport Extreme and Airport Express to factory settings and built a whole new network.

This took way too many hours out of my day to resolve.

Next time there is any firmware upgrade, I will wait and review the forums for those that automatically upgraded like I did. This way, I will let others inform me about the effectiveness of the upgrade and if there are any issues.

I thank those sorry auto-adopters in advance.

Would that you could wait, Bruce. When the update was released, all my devices started flashing yellow and wouldn't work until I performed the update. There was no choice but to move forward with the installation. I think it worked differently for others, but many were in the same boat, basically forced to install the upgrade. This was truly one of the worst update offenses I've experienced. I hope Apple takes a lot of extra time before releasing another update ahead of when it's ready for "prime time!."

No update is "mandatory." The best thing you can do for yourself is fix your Airport Utility preferences and turn the update checking OFF. Then you can decide when you want to update or not.

Thanks for this info. The first thing I usually do, in all my apps, is check the preferences. For some reason, though, I'd never even thought to check in Airport Utilities. Too late now, but great to have this info for the future. I've already changed my preference.! Thanks.

It seems my network has stabilized. As with others, the difference was when I went beyond using the "restart" command in Airport Utility (5.5.3), and did a "hard reset" on my Extreme with a paperclip. Held it down for about 10 seconds, until I got the rapidly flashing light. Then back into Airport Utility, and set up everything from scratch.

Same thing with my Airport Express: hard reset, then I was able to start from scratch.

Can't believe these issues didn't come up in beta testing.....

i managed to solve my issue...

i had 7.5.2 running in bridge mode with this topology:

internet adsl router -> airport extreme 3rd gen (wan port)

gigaethernet switch -> airport lan port

various wired devices connected to eth switch (including imac)

various wireless devices connected on 2.4ghz to airport (apple tv among them)

time capsule expanding extreme wireless range

this network was running reliably for more than a year.

when the airport detected 7.6 was released by apple it went to orange blinking....

everything kept running with a single exception: wired to/from wireless were not handling dhcp requests as before

yes this happened without anybody touching anything on the net (it just stopped working)

first thing i did to troubleshoot it was updating the airport to 7.6 using the imac (airport tool 5.5.3 on lion).

after flash was complete... airport hanged and nothing worked (not even internet connectivity)

factory defaults restore by holding reset button on powerup....

tried again setting the aiport with initial values to allow simple internet connectevity.... no luck

every time i tried to save the settings the airport hanged and factory rest was required....

i thought it was 7.6 issue...... so rolled back to 7.5.2

tried again and again (factory reset with button and setting basic bridge to get internet.... no luck)

thought it was osx 5.5.3 airport tool... so downloaded (by connecting windows laptop directly to dsl router) the 5.5.3 airport tool for windows..... tried again all the process ... no luck

then i tried factory resetting again and configuring basic setting with ipad... and it worked.... i had basic internet thru airport...

so back to osx airport tool to configure the remaining settings not available on ipad simple tool (like enabling 5ghz etc)... and airport hanged.... rebooted and i noticed all changes were not saved (only the ones done from ipad were kept)... tried many times.. no luck...

so i thought it was 5.5.3 tool that was faulty.....(tried 5.5.2 on snow leopard)... same thing...

i then turned off airport extreme thinking it was hardware faulty and tried everything again on the timecapsule as main station... same results...

solution:

disconnected the lan cable from the airport (kept only the wan connection) and everything worked good over wireless (osx lion 5.5.3 with airport 7.6).. everything worked fine lastly...with one exception:

dhcp requests are still not relayed between wired and wireless segments...

it seems airport 7.5.2/7.6 and/or airport tool 5.5.2/5.5.3 has some kind of issues when having wired+wireless connectivity when configuring... if i connect the wired ethernet i can replicate the issue everytime...

too bad it took me 2 days of testing all possible combinations to find out what apple did not...

please apple fix this asap....

hope it helps somebody out there ....

good luck