[dbogdan]

I have an Airport Base Station, (V4.0.8 Firmware) connected to an ADSL modem using PPPoE to my ISP (Earthlink). The DSL service is "always on" and, until recently, the Airport Status indicator in the Menu Bar seemed to reflect this. Sometimes this status bar would indicated over 200 hours of "on time" or more before I would decide to reboot or manually disconnect for one reason or another. But the connection has been rock solid, all things considered. I have the ABS take that connection and distribute IP address to two of my iMacs on a local Wireless Network (10.0.1.2 and 10.0.1.3). After initial setup pangs 18 months ago, I have been very, very pleased with this setup. Recently, for reasons unknown to me, things have gotten mysteriously flaky on the "always on" connection status...

I can verify a solid DSL connection and have access to the Internet on either or both machines. Later, when I come home from work or wake up in the morning, I would see that the Airport Status in the Menu Bar will show that the Base Station has disconnected and, although I have set up the ABS to "always stay connected," via Internet Connection app, the ABS does not seem to recognize that the connection has been dropped, and a reconnect is necessary. The ADSL modem is still on and registering the same IP address as when I logged it before I went to work or went to bed. I can manually reconnect through the Internet Connect app and everything seems fine again - for some undetermined period of time, when I go through the same thing again. Over the past several days, I have noticed that the Airport Status in the Menu Bar will reflect sometimes very short periods of connection time, even though it is obvious to me that a connection was never truly dropped, as I was in the middle of a long FTP or File Transfer via an "unnamed peer-to-peer" program which continued uninterrupted. Is this a symptom of anything unwelcomed on my networking front? Is my ABS about to blow up and die? I had this problem going back to 10.2.4 intermittently, and it seems to remain in my current version of OS (10.3). I suspect and pray that there is a preference (.plist) gone awry, rather than an imminent hardware failure on the part of my ABS, but I fear dumping any or all networks preferences willy-nilly without really knowing what I'm doing.

It appears to me that the DSL modem is maintaining the connection to my ISP via PPPoE, but the Base Station seems to stop dishing it out over the wireless network until I request that it be redone. Then it seemingly drops and sometimes reconnects on an intermittent basis from time to time. It's very confusing to me.

I haven't changed any network settings in months and this problem(?) seems very random in nature. Has anyone else seen or experienced this phenomena? I have searched many fora, including those at Apple.com, and have been unable to find any symptom corresponding to the ones I've described above?

Any help would be appreciated. I'd be happy to clarify any technical info if anyone seems to think that it might be relevant, but right now I don't want to dump a bunch of techno-weenie overkill info on everyone unnecessarily...

Thanks in advance!!

[ghporter]

Techno-weenie or not, you can do a few things to verify whether or not it is indeed your ABS, and not your ISP that's causing problems. (Who is your ISP, anyway? It could make a difference.)

Firstly, you say that your DSL connection "appears" to be solid when your ABS doesn't connect you to the Internet. How are you judgeing that? The definitive test is to plug your computer directly into the DSL modem, tell your Mac to connect using PPPoE, and see if you indeed do have a solid connection. Further, my DSL modem has four lights, and three of them are on all the time, whether or not I have a real connection. The fourth shows "activity" on the ethernet connection, and may or may not indicate anything more than data going to the modem. You need to somehow test the connection.

If you have the Dual Ethernet ABS, you can check out whether or not it's the wireless part of the ABS by plugging into the second ethernet port and seeing if you'r connected.

Some ISPs use some pretty interesting tricks to determine whether or not a connection is really "active," and you may be getting dropped when you're not really using the computer.