Saturday 29 June 2013

Wifi issues long term fix - Mountain Lion dropping connection

Further investigation on the Apple site - I found that 10.8.4 has a wifi diagnostics facility. Access this by pressing the option button and clicking the wifi connection. This just let me know there was an issue. I rang Apple and the first thing we tried was rebooting and holding down cmd-r until the apple logo and spinning icon appeared. This went into diagnostic mode.

From there we tried browsing the internet, and again the connection dropped.

Very strange that it was only the two Apple MacBooks (Air and Pro) that were dropping. iPhones, iPads and windows PC were fine.

So we tried turning of the router (Time capsule) for 30+ seconds and turning it on again. When it rebooted the two Macs now reconnected and maintained consistent wifi connection - perfect! The helpful Apple support analyst explained that sometimes with too many wifi devices it can switch channels to compensate, and then get stuck on a channel. Hmm, not sure I fully understand that how that causes this. But anyway restarting the time capsule router has resolved the problem, thankfully.

I'm also doing an update of the other computer to 10.8.4 which includes an update of the time capsule firmware, which should ensure the problem has gone for good.

Wifi Issues with OS X Mountain Lion - temporary fix

Today I've been experiencing a critical Mountain Lion OS X issue on my MacBook Pro. Googling it gave indicated a short term fix is to use the ping command in the terminal, and ping to your router, and that will stop the Wifi going to sleep, and won't impact the internet speed.

This problem is affecting OS X 10.8.3 and 10.8.4 :-(

1. Open Airport Utility to find out the IP address of your router (assuming using an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule)
2. Open terminal window
3. Type "ping 10.0.1.1" where 10.0.1.1 is the ip address of your router
4. Leave this running and it will keep the wifi awake.

I hope Apple fix this soon.