10.4: A possible fix for wireless connection problems

Aug 18, '05 09:14:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Tiger only hintWell, much like may other people, ever since I upgraded to Tiger, I have had issues with the AirPort connection on my good ol' Pismo. No automatic connection whatsoever -- on bootup, restart, or wake from sleep. It was really annoying. My home wireless network (DLink WEP protected) would show up, and I could manually connect, but not without human intervention.

I finally found the complete answer: Keychain and Network Preference settings:

  1. In Network Preferences > AirPort, set the "By default, join:" to "Preferred network."
  2. In AirPort > Options..., set "If no preferred networks are found:" to "Keep looking for recent networks."
  3. In Utilities > Keychain Access, select your Network under Login Keychains. Check the "Show password:" box and make sure it is correct -- mine had a "0x" prefix added to it that I had to remove. Under the "Access Control" tab, select the "Allow all applications to access this item." I may be wrong, but I think this is the key to getting all of the automatic connections to work, well, automatically.
I had been able to get partial success with the first two steps, but until I did the third step, nothing was consistent, especially automatic connection at startup. Hope this helps. I would be interested to see if it works with other people's setups.

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