[cms]

I have run my desktop iMac G4 superdrive as a software base station without problems for well over a year now. Three other computers are networked to it via Airport cards and share a wireless internet connection (cable 1 meg internet connection) without a problem.

At least, there was no problem until tonight......

Now I can get my client machines to see the softare base station and connect properly for about 10 minutes. Then the connection drops completely and doesn't reappear until I've shut the entire network down for up to 30 minutes. I can then reconnect the client computers without difficulty......but only for about 10 minutes. After which, the whole cycle starts again.

Any ideas on what this might be? I'm running 10.2.6 and have enjoyed flawless connections until today. I can't think of anything that I might have installed or done different, so suspect it's either terribly complicated or something very simple that I have overlooked.

Thanks for your help

[aaanorton]

Often odd dropouts like that are caused by your cable provider's network having troubles. You can try to wait it out or you can call them and ask if there is a problem on their side. At which point they'll tell you to sit tight and wait it out. I've seen stuff like this on my otherwise great cable service before.

[cms]

Originally posted by aaanorton:
Often odd dropouts like that are caused by your cable provider's network having troubles. You can try to wait it out or you can call them and ask if there is a problem on their side. At which point they'll tell you to sit tight and wait it out. I've seen stuff like this on my otherwise great cable service before.

Thanks for the information. I shut everything down last night and when I booted all systems again this morning, everything was fine ....... for about 15 minutes (slight improvement over last night's 10 minutes ) However, the connection on the client computers dropped suddenly and completely and now I can't seem to get them to reconnect at all.

While I appreciate that this might well be an ISP issue, I can see no evidence of similar problems on their user message boards. Usually, the flaming start the SECOND something goes wrong!

So I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this must be something at this end.

Any further thoughts anyone? Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

[cms]

Just an update:

It's definitely a problem with my desktop or Airport card. I hooked up my cable modem to my iBook and ran that machine as the Software Base Station with no problem at all.

I've run the Apple hardware diagnostics disk and it indicates there is no problem with the airport card. However, it will neither receive nor send now....

Should I try reinstalling the Airport software to see if that makes a difference? I am presently running version 3.0.4 on 10.2.6. Should I try downgrading to an earlier version, and if so, how would I do that?

Thanks for your help....