10.3: A fix for semi-functional Panther networking

Jan 23, '04 09:56:00AM

Contributed by: tcurtin

If you recently upgraded to Panther and find yourself unable to connect using Ethernet but wireless works, or vice versa, open up Console (in /Applications/Utilities), click the "Logs" icon on the top left, and select system.log. If you see an error about UniNEnet::restartTransmitter - transmitter appeared to be hung, there may be an easy fix.

In my case, I had installed the Netlock VPN Client for Nortel Contivity some time ago, and never uninstalled it. There was a folder called /Library/StartupItems/Nleac that was causing the problem -- after moving it, and restarting the iBook, the problem went away.

Of course, that's a condensed version of many hours worth of work, iteratively moving files into and out of a clean system until networking broke, and finally narrowed it down. You could go the easier route, and as suggested in this hint, just move files out of /Library/StartupItems and /Library/Extensions first...

To see some of the apple forum discussions, go to info.apple.com, put restarttransmitter in the search box, and set category to "search discussions". I'd include links, but the search function doesn't seem to be working right now. Judging by the forums, this is a pretty nebulous problem effecting many users, so there's probably a deeper networking issue that Netlock just happened to be triggering in my case. YMMV! Good luck.

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