Upgrade to 7.6 broke my network

I have extended network with one express. After constantly having to unplug and restart my ancient snow I did research and replaced it with an extreme. My restart problems went away and I experienced no problems with the router. The upgrade to 7.6 began causing problems with occasional slow downs. Remotely restarting the router fixed the problem but it would return after a day or so. After reading all these posts I downgraded to 7.5.2. Hopefully, I am back to a stable network.

jfancherla,

Have you tried switching the order of upgrading the main base station and the extender ? Try upgrading the extender first and then the main base station to 7.6. If you already have upgraded both unit's and are seeing an issue, revert both back to 7.5.2, then upgrade the extender first to 7.6 and the the main to 7.6. I used this to fix my network issues sometime back.

Took a dozen resets/retries to extend my 1st gen Extreme 802.11n to a second one, same kind. It just kept stalling out on the restart. I started by resetting the main base station and network settings. I have no idea how I got it to eventually work. I don't think I did anything differently. Just pushed the reset button both with it plugged in and with it unplugged for about a minute each time. I think the plugged in one is the one that worked. Did the same with an old Express 802.11g and it only took three tries on that one. So after a lot of stress and wasted time, they are both extending on either side of my main base station. The install & reset process should really be pretty simple and doable by a layperson. How about firmware that upgrades and reboots all connected Airports simultaneously, only having to put in the password of the network once? C'mon, Apple.

Tell 'em if you want your voice to be heard.

Apple - AirPort Extreme - Feedback

hedzerfromson wrote:

Thanks Martin for the heads up. Although i am not using a time capsule, i am actualy using a hub from behind which I made the firmware upload. To avoid anymore upset family members I will try definitely your way in the weekend when everybody is out. Let you know the result. For now I have stable network, but on the cost of fixed IP adresses.

I was appoached by an Apple engineer through this blog and helped me to solve the issue!!

I was asked to send the config files of the 3 airport expresses and my network setup with all the equipment. Then he analysed my config files and found some things that I did not notice, see below his text:

I took a look at the config. files and noticed you are using 'domain' as your domain name and you are using DHCP client id's. I am assuming you intended to use these. Also AE 1 and AE 3 have their wireless security settings set to WPA/WPA2 Personal while AE 2 has it set to WPA2 Personal. So client's won't roam across these network's. The security on all 3 need to be WPA2 Personal so the network appears exactly the same to client's that roam. Unless you have 2 different devices sending out DHCP, not sure why the double assigned IP issue is showing up. Can you send me a screenshot of this when it occur's ?

The other TPLink switch you have, can you confirm that switch is not a router handing out IP address's ?

So we can try a few things here:

- Change security on all devices to do WPA2 Personal.

- Get rid of the DHCP client id's and domain if possible.

- Now upgrade the 3 Base Station unit's to 7.6.

- Verify security on all devices is set to WPA2 personal.

Now if everything works well, then add the domain name and test again. If things go well, then add the DHCP client id's and verify things go well. If you notice any one device not working well, try a hard reboot by unplugging/replugging the device and check if that fixes it.

Thanks again for all your time and help and hopefully the above steps will resolve the issue.

I followed the steps as stated and the network is running as smoothly as before.

1st I was realy surprised to be directly adressed by Apple and secondly I am happy again with my Apple equipment

A delighted customer again ! Thanks Suresh

Good to know it's not just me. I have a TC and Windows 7. The 7.6 upgrade resulted in various devices, such as my iPhones and laptops to lose connection, yet my iPads still worked. They could all identify my network, but could not connect. I have reverted back to v7.5.2.

Hopefully, things will be back to normal now.

Bad Apple!

Thank you hedzerfromson! Removing the domain name from the router config did the trick! 3 Extremes and 2 Expreses upgraded to 7.6 and all is well.

Thanks again, Dave

hedzerfromson wrote:

hedzerfromson wrote:

Thanks Martin for the heads up. Although i am not using a time capsule, i am actualy using a hub from behind which I made the firmware upload. To avoid anymore upset family members I will try definitely your way in the weekend when everybody is out. Let you know the result. For now I have stable network, but on the cost of fixed IP adresses.

I was appoached by an Apple engineer through this blog and helped me to solve the issue!!

I was asked to send the config files of the 3 airport expresses and my network setup with all the equipment. Then he analysed my config files and found some things that I did not notice, see below his text:

I took a look at the config. files and noticed you are using 'domain' as your domain name and you are using DHCP client id's. I am assuming you intended to use these. Also AE 1 and AE 3 have their wireless security settings set to WPA/WPA2 Personal while AE 2 has it set to WPA2 Personal. So client's won't roam across these network's. The security on all 3 need to be WPA2 Personal so the network appears exactly the same to client's that roam. Unless you have 2 different devices sending out DHCP, not sure why the double assigned IP issue is showing up. Can you send me a screenshot of this when it occur's ?

The other TPLink switch you have, can you confirm that switch is not a router handing out IP address's ?

So we can try a few things here:

- Change security on all devices to do WPA2 Personal.

- Get rid of the DHCP client id's and domain if possible.

- Now upgrade the 3 Base Station unit's to 7.6.

- Verify security on all devices is set to WPA2 personal.

Now if everything works well, then add the domain name and test again. If things go well, then add the DHCP client id's and verify things go well. If you notice any one device not working well, try a hard reboot by unplugging/replugging the device and check if that fixes it.

Thanks again for all your time and help and hopefully the above steps will resolve the issue.

I followed the steps as stated and the network is running as smoothly as before.

1st I was realy surprised to be directly adressed by Apple and secondly I am happy again with my Apple equipment

A delighted customer again ! Thanks Suresh

Glad it worked for your case, but its of little use to those of us who don't use a domain name or client IDs' and other forms of security.

After upgrading to 7.6, everything seemed working fine.

A day later, some problems occured, the negative counting of the online-timer beeing the most obvious.

Unreliable network connections and slow surfing, lost downloads and so on came up.

Further investigation showed unreliable pings within the network and to the internet (replies up to some seconds, or even lost pings) - appearing randomly with no predictable pattern.

The misbehaving network even led to broken iOS wifi-syncs, so i had to restore my iPhone to fix it.

Some hours of playing with the configuration (changing wifi-channel and much more) and many lost brain cells later, I decided to step back to 7.5.2. (Airport-Utility -> Base Station/Upload Firmware...) - everything working fine now again...

-----------------------------

Network environment:

Time Capsule (1st Gen), 2 Airport Expresses as printer/airplay-clients, a handful of Macs, PCs and iOS-Devices

Thanks for this discussion. I don't recall doing the 7.6 update, but apparently I did. I have recently been having intermittent connectivity problems that I hadn't been having before. Specifically, my Toshiba TV was having trouble authenticating to the network, and then couldn't authenticate at all. I set up a guest network without security, but it wouldn't remain connected to that either, forcing me to log in every time I turned on the TV. Then this morning my Windows laptop, which has never had a problem connecting to my Airport network, couldn't authenticate, when none of the settings have changed. So I have tried downgrading the firmware to 7.5.2, and suddenly my TV can authenticate, and the laptop connection is restored. Very odd and annoying, but hopefully this continues and to work, and hopefully I remember this problem the next time there's an upgrade.

This is killing me too. I can't get devices to even see the network (WinXP laptop and Macbook can) whilst iPhones, iPad and Sony W7 can't.

Tried to start everything all over again and even downgraded to 7.5.2. Still no joy.

Any help would be great otherwise going to have to get someone clever over here to sort it.

Apple #mega fail.

Seriously someone from Apple needs to engage here!

Sounds like a more fundamental problem with the ´radio level´ of the connection, not the ´IP-level´.

During all my hassle, logging into the wifi-connection went with ease and has been stable.

Maybe the air is overcrowded, did you look for busy/free wifi-channels using ´airport radar widget´ for example?

For me, it sounds like Apple isn´t to blame for that...

7.6 killed internet performance on my Time Capsule. 7.52 rollback fixed it. Other devices like airport express seem ok with 7.6 but not Time Capsule. I may try upgrading again as some suggest and see if it takes this time.

Like a great many here My TimeCapsule "broke my network" after the F/W upgrade to 7.6

I tried downgrading (I had no trouble downgrading) however my Internet Net proformance is still horrible.

But here is something different and interesting.

I completely removed my TimeCapsule from the network and am connecting, WiFi, directly to the DSL router and still my speeds are the same as when I upgraded to 7.6.

It seems that somehow, the TC upgrade affected my local iMac.

Any ideas please of how I can "Fix" "repair" my thoughput, keeping my TC offline, until a F/W upgrade from Apple is available?

Thank you.

It may sound a daft question, but your DSL router is 'n' standard and not just b/g.... The one that both my current ISP - BE (thompson) and previous ISP - BT (3wire) where both only b/g standard, and poor output at that. Until I moved to the Apple Airports I use now, my old Cisco a/b/g aironets put the 'supplied' routers/access points to shame.

Also note that the wired connection - when going device to device via the built-in switch on my fast ethernet version of the Airport was better than both the 3wire (really poor) and the Thompson slightly better. Both of which performed more like hubs!