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November 30, 2006

troubleshooting

Intel-based Mac having DHCP woes? Skip to the end.

Posted Nov. 30, ’06, 9:22 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Troubleshooting

Network PaneI’d been running into some problems of late with my MacBook, where it refused to acquire an IP address from my wireless router. I’d get on the network, and it would just end up with an auto-configuration IP (169.254.x.x). My B&W tower and PC were both fine, and neither of my roommates were banging down my door to complain. On other networks, my MacBook was fine, though it meant I had to bounce back and forth between DHCP and manually assigned addresses. Fun.

When the problem did eventually spread to my desktops, I got fed up and did some searching, finally coming across a solution thread on Linksys’s forum (the manufacturers of my router—a WRT54Gv5, if you’re wondering), faulting the most recent firmware. I downgraded the firmware to the previous version and voilà, DHCP harmony was returned.

This morning I noticed that Apple had posted a support document entitled: “Mac OS X 10.4.8: Intel-based Mac can’t obtain IP address from third-party wireless router.” Eager to see what tricks they had up their sleeve, I checked it out to find the following advice:

Solution

1. Turn the wireless router off and back on.
Note: This step will disconnect any clients currently connected to the wireless network provided by this router.
2. If restarting the router does not resolve the issue, contact the manufacturer of the third-party wireless router to resolve this issue.

Yeah, thanks Apple. Real helpful. If you’re suffering from this issue, my advice is skip straight to step two.


5 Comments

DWesnor said:

I learned a valuable lesson a long time ago: Never update firmware unless something is broken.

November 30, 2006 10:01 AM
Brian Schumacher said:

I have had the same issue. I take my MacBook around to clients during the day usually just connecting to a WiFi network then closing the lid and leaving for another client. When I arrive at the next client I open my MacBook connect to the WiFi network, no problem, but no IP address. This is a very frustrating problem. Although I had not narrowed it down to Linksys I do have many Linksys routers in operation.
I remember having a similar issue many moons ago with D-Link routers. At that time the solution was changing the preamble length to 'short'. Wonder if it could be a similar issue?

November 30, 2006 10:27 AM
Tom said:

I read about this yesterday. So I checked their website. Linksys has updated their firmware to fix the issue as of now.

November 30, 2006 12:12 PM
Jody said:

I had this exact problem over Thanksgiving with a G5 iMac and a 12" G4 PowerBook connected to a Linksys WRT54Gv5, so I do think the Linksys issue is Intel specific in any way. All machines were running 10.4.8, though.

November 30, 2006 12:21 PM
mshoaf said:

I just got a 20" iMac C2D last week, and I had the same problem. I simply restarted the router (physically at the router, not thru the browser-based utility). Worked fine after that. Today was the first I had heard that it was an issue beyond my own setup.

I usually connect over a wired ethernet cable, but I did want to make sure the AirPort hardware/software was functioning correctly on the new machine.

December 1, 2006 8:23 AM

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