Self assigned IP address

About virus protection, the Macintosh is not the target of most viruses so why bother? Well, there are several reasons to bother. The primary reason is to not spread email viruses you receive from others and forward on to others. Your Mac likely cannot be infected but you can spread them.

Having said this I don't use virus protection. Here is what I do instead.

I set up a standard account to use for everyday work. From this account I can also update most software by just entering my administrator ID and password when asked. I set this up by creating a new account for the administrator, logging out of my old admin account, logging into the new admin account and making the old one—the one with all of documents, music, etc—into a standard account. This way, if I happen to get something bad it cannot do much damage since I am no longer an admin. On the rare times when I need to be admin I log in as admin.

Also, I don't open email attachments from people I don't know. If someone sends a Word attachment I send them hate mail, remind them to use PDF and then open it with TextEdit or Pages, copy the content and paste it into a new Word document, if necessary. I don't use Excel, but do something similar with PowerPoint attachments. I stay away from pirate sites for music, anime, or whatever. I stay away from **** sites and gambling sites and political whining sites. I also turn off Java in the web browser. I turn it on if necessary for a trusted site then turn it off again. This takes paying attention to where you are and what you are doing, but no more so than the attention you need for driving, bicycling or walking in any city.

Mac OS X is a Unix OS. No matter what the Windows folks are saying, it is still the most secure OS for the consumer market. It has a great family history in the military and education settings so it is by design secure. What I do to it makes it even more secure. I have been running Unix systems since 1998. This is stuff I learn from Unix admins.

I am currenlty experiencing this problem and have tried all the fixes suggested but am unable to find the three files under sytem configuration that several users have suggested I should delete to test this method, can anyone offer any ideas? I am running on OS 10.6.8. maybe the files are named differently or in another folder? Any other new found fixes would be greatly welcome as well, nothing is working! Thanks

I fixed it on my computer... Do you have an anti-virus program installed? My program VirusBarrier X6 was blocking my wireless router. Not sure why it thought it should do that, but it did. This kept Airport from getting an IP address from the router. If you have an antivirus program, disable it to see if that fixes the problem. As soon as I did that, BAM, I was back in business!

No sadly that is not my issue, thank you for the reply though. Currently wokring around my issue with a very long cable!

I had a similiar issue with my home network and nothing worked for long that I tried above. I reset my router and than had trouble finding my wireless network, i shut off WEP security...stil nothing...turned on WPA security in my router and it came up on the network search and now everything is connected. For some reason no mac products wanted to connect or find my router using a WEP password.

after now 6 hours and trying everything on this post I finally found one that worked.

I just guess 166224 Views, and 116 replies is just not enough for apple to fix this !!!

I have tried everything listed here and only now just found a fix.

The MacBook Pro does not have a working ethernet port and apple have already told me £400 + to fix that.

I can connect to outside networks (cafe etc) no problem, but at home on my own network nothing.

- deleted keychain

- deleted plist files

- restarted computer

- restarted router (in every order possible)

- checked firmware on router

- checked updated on Macbook

- no antivirus

- random numbers in DHCP client ID

finally one that worked.

- set to manual IP address

- connect

- now set back to DHCP

- reset with 123 in DHCP client ID

- now have proper IP with correct internet connection

Yippeee

now how do I get 1/4 day of my life back !!!

HTH

This 'Self assigned IP address' problem has plagued me for weeks. I looked all around the web, googling for solutions, alas, to no avail. I've even reinstalled the OS, but after a few days the problems were back again.

Until I found a reference somewhere that it could be related to bluetooth interfering with the wifi signal. And surely, the problem mostly occured when I used my MacBook Air at work, where I also often use a bluetooth trackpad & keyboard. At home, when bluetooth is turned off most of the time, I rarely ran into problems (after the reinstall).

When bluetooth is turned of, 9 times out of 10 there is no problem with the wifi connection. After it is connected, I can turn BT back on again and start using trackpad & keyboard. From time to time, my wifi signal drops, but when that happens I just turn of bluetooth, turn wifi off and on again, and start using bluetooth again.

TL;DR: Bluetooth interfered with my wifi connectivity, turning it off (until wifi is connected) resolved my problems.

I hope it can help several of you, who are still struggling with the self-assigned ip problem.

Whew, thank you, finally a solution that worked for me!

I have a very wierd set of data on this problem...

1. 3 of us with MacBook Pros working on a ship

2. There is 1 ethernet cable connection in our office to provide us with internet. To use it we simply plug in and go.

3. 2 of us can do this fine, 1 cannot, the self assigned IP problem crops up.

4. My computer was one of the working macbooks but 2 days ago it developed serious hard disk/startup problems. I had an old spare macbook pro from 2 years ago as an emergency spare for the 3 of us.... I had also prepared us with a small external drive with a LION installation partition. I booted the spare computer from the external drive, erased the hard disk and re-installed LION then re-installed my computer from my time machine backup (last backed up 3 hours before the crash!).

So now my spare computer was restored to the same state as my dead computer.

5. When I plugged in the ethernet cable, my spare computer has the self assigned IP address issue.

SO.... Take a deep breath!

6. I tried to fix my dead computer with my external drive but it stayed dead. I decided that the hard drive would probably be ok so decided to remove it and swap it for the drive in my external drive case (same type of drive). For safe keeping I put the drive from my external into my dead mac.

When I tried to start up my dead mac, it was now alive again... as if by magic! I therefore suspected that a loose hard drive connection may have been responsible so plugged in (via USB) the external drive (which contained the original drive from the computer) and re-booted from that drive. My computer with its original data came back to life.

With my old drive booting my once dead computer via USB, I connected the ethernet and hey presto... it worked.

Now for the WACKO part

7. I shut down my once dead computer and plugged my external drive into my spare computer and re-booted from the external drive. My spare computer woke up in exactly the same as way as it did on my once dead computer... as it should have.

8. I plugged in the ethernet - My spare computer STILL has the self assigned IP address issue.

TO SUMMARISE

2 computers, 1 external hard disk drive. Boot one computer with the drive and the internet works, boot the other with the same drive and the self assigned IP address issue arises.

Ideas anyone!?!

Maybe there's a limit on the number of different computers (two) that can use the ethernet connection. If it's coming through a modem, check the configuration on the modem.

Another suggestion (that you've probably already tried) would be to copy exactly the network settings from one of the working computers to the one that's not.

If that doesn't do it, is there an anti-virus barrier on the non-working computer/drive? That can also block the network connection.

WOW thank you to everyone. Collaboratively, all of this has helped me so much. I am now back on my mac after MONTHS of not being able to get online. It kept happening over and over and finally just totally clocked out on me. I went to mac who said, "well it works fine here, so without us being at your house there's nothing we can do. here's a reference number so you can call machelp and they can assist you further." "thanks" I said, "What about my t not being able to be capital?" "Can't say much about that."

so thanks for that macstore.

anyway...

i did each of these things more than one time. Resetting the location. deleting the wifi network, going in the keychain access and not only deleting the current networks and passwords, but all the old ones. turning it all back on again. turning EVERYthing back off and on again over and over. restarting. changing my IP adresses,finding them on my phone, changing from WPA password, to trying all of them listed. Everything i read on the first handful of pages on here i tried. FINALLY

i read a post about how someone went in and changed the type of password and it lead me to finally just try to log into my router. Never done this before and I think that's what finally did it. I went it and got all the IP addresses (just to be sure) and put them in as the DHCP manual. I reset the password on my router website, and the region said Europe, not sure why so i changed that too as im in chicago. Made sure it was on the WPA2 password setting. went back into my network preferences and did the same. Once again, i deleted the netowrk from the list, turned wifi off, closed all browsers and went back in. turned wifi on, put in network, set it to the WPA2 password security and put in password again. FINALLY SUCCESS!!!!! it took me over 2 hours but here i am. I don't know which of those really worked alone, I think it was all of it together. What a pain in the ***. Got a mac to avoid **** like this. Pff. Good LUCK!!!!😐

After weeks and weeks of changing settings on the mac with no joy. I logged into my router and changed the network mode from MIXED to B/G only.

I then renewed the lease on the wifi connection on my mac and it worked !!

Victory!

I’m glad these peer-to-peer Apple discussion groups exist, otherwise I’d still be trying to deal with my “self-assigned IP address” problem. Like others here I wasn’t able to get online and kept getting that message on my screen. Unlike most others who have commented, however, I use an older Powermac PC G5 (non-Intel) desktop running OS 10.5.8 (Leopard) and connect via ethernet.

I’ve dealt with a lot of connections issues over the years and always managed to muddle through, but this one wasn’t like any of the others and the usual fixes didn’t work. It was compounded by a number of false clues:

-- The date and time periodically would reset to 1969. This usually indicates the PRAM battery needs to be replaced, so I put a new one in. The IP address problem remained. There was a I kept getting a message about a problem with the “AppleVNCserver.bundle.” And there were others.

I tried many things: Rebooted the router and modem. Trashed some network preferences. Swapped out ethernet cables. Spent long hours configuring and reconfiguring the Network setup. It told me that a) I wasn’t connected to the Internet (I knew that) or b) The ethernet cable was not connected (but it was).

I even called my ISP (Time Warner) but they had no ideas – and they don’t want to know about Macs anyway.

Finally, I came to this forum where I found suggestions for every conceivable kind of fix, many of which sounded like they were worth checking out, so I tried a few. I did two of the suggested things today and one of them– or maybe both – was the solution.

-- I found the com.apple.alf.plist file and trashed it.

-- I opened System Preferences, went to Security > Firewall and changed the option from “Set access” to “Allow all incoming connections.” (The options might be different in versions of the OS other than 10.5.8.) Immediately my Mail inbox began filling up and I could get online. So, many, many thanks to whoever it was who suggested those fixes.

I ran into the same thing today after replacing three Airport Extreme devices. A MacBook Pro and a virtual machine were not getting an IP address anymore from the router that has DHCP enebled. Just extending the DHCP range with some extra addresses solved the problem.

I've tried ALL other methods I can think of and this was the only solution that worked for me.

I have a 2012 Macbook Air.

A Belkin N300 Router (I believe the router to be the main issue here).

I just logged into my router and turned the firewall off and then connecting wasn't an issue.