Alright here is the basic rundown of the trouble we’re facing. Macs 10.6 and above will randomly disconnect from our wireless. Windows PCs and 10.4 and 10.5 Macs work fine. Even Macs that are dual booted work on the windows side but not the Mac 10.6 side.
We’ve been working on this for months, contacted Cisco (wireless equipment provider), and Apple (still waiting to hear back) and have had no luck. The one bandaid we do have is assigning a Static IP, which really isn’t what we are looking for.
It appears in the console that the Mac’s are requesting a new IP address ever 20 seconds even with a Static IP in place.
Anyone know about a similar issue either on OSX 10.6 or Linux/Unix?
Maybe not related but the Mac firewall in my experience has caused alot of issues with DHCP. Even after giving permission to DHCP I’ve had to reset the firewall settings as it was blocking DHCP and related apps.
Try turning the firewall off and see if that fixes anything perhaps. Just a suggestion.
Sucks. Was worth a shot. Odd it’s chattering so much even with a static IP assigned. I know Rendezvous is a rather chatty protocol. In fact at Ingram Micro we had to disable that on our macs because it was causing issues with the production network (or so they said).
If I think of anything else I’ll throw it out there and I’m in for others info too.
I am willing to bet its your wireless card driver issue. I had this with my internal card on a older Linux version that did the same thing and the newer disto with kernel patches fixed it. I dont think it was a DHCP getting a new IP, my issue was it wasnt setting up the keys right and would eventually die when the AP tried to rekey.
All our access points are N capable, we only have Cisco APs and our new ones are Aironets I believe (not sure on model #)
Princeton had a report that the Macs would connect a/n and try to grab an IP for both channels. Not sure if this is true or not.
At this point it doesn’t seem like there is anything too service. It appears to be something with OS 10.6. On the controller logs the 10.6 Macs try and renew their DHCP lease every 20 seconds, which floods the network. From what I was told by my boss, the 10.5 Macs also try and renew the lease frequently but not as bad as the 10.6 ones.
When we switched over the Wireless-N access points here at the office, the wireless on my linux laptop went HAYWIRE. Dog shit slow, constant disconnects, etc… I ended up having to edit some configs and force it back into Wireless-G mode.
The linux drivers for Wireless-N cards are just shit. Mac might be suffering the same?
Control Click didn’t work…However if you go into the System Profiler >> Network >> Airport >> It lists me as connected 802.11g (I’m connected to our older AP rather than our new ones.)
I’ve tried viewing the config files but I don’t know what opens them. I tried Text Editor but to no avail. I understand the whole “we’re apple don’t look at our shit” and people buying these apples because “I’m going to college and I need one and it’s silver and shiny” but come on. Troubleshooting these things is a bitch, the system logs are a joke.