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Got a brand new MacBook, running 10.5.1, everything works fine apart from Airport not remembering the password for my girlfriends WEP protected network. Every time i boot it up and open Safari i am greeted with the not connected to the internet message. go in to network diagnosis and enter the WEP password, tick the "remember in my keychain" box. It will then connect to the network, but will drop it if MB goes to sleep, is closed or powered down.

Also when the machine has booted. The Airport icon in the start bar indicates that it is connected to a network but still needs to be prompted with the password.

I am running 10.5.1 on my G5 imac and have had no issues whatsoever.

Any ideas????

A WEP password is as good as no password. So my recommendation is dump WEP for nothing, or change to WPA.

others have the same problem - Leopard simply doesn't remember secured networks. Mine remembers the password but not that it should connect to my network in the first place.
As far as WEP vs. WPA or no password, WPA is better, but if your only concern is keeping people from using the network, WEP will do the job, but it doesn't provide real security against malicious attacks.

Saying Leopard doesn't remember is overly broad. I have Leopard on two Mac laptops, and it always remembers past wifi networks and their WPA passwords.

If WEP won't work, and your only concern is limiting access, try using the MAC address filtering option.

Regardless of the people complaining about your use of WEP, there is a flaw the causes this behavior regardless of which encryption method you use. (WEP, WPA, WPA2, etc.)

Have you by any chance moved System Preferences.app from /Applications to someplace else? (such as a the Utilities folder)

For some reason, setting up an airport network relies on System Preferences to access the system keychain. In addition, it has the path to to find System Preferences hard-coded to /Applications/System Preferences.app instead of using Launch Services to find it.

As a result, if you've moved it, the key will work for your current session, but will not be saved to the system keychain for future use. The fact that the key failed to save will be silently ignored. This problem has existed at least since Tiger. I reported it to Apple after spending several months debugging the issue. However, the problem still persists today.

In case you're curious, run the following from the command line:

strings /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Apple80211 | grep Preferences

to see the reference.

You could also open up Keychain Utility and repair your keychain.

Ok guys thanks for th input, took the MB round to my place and it had no problems remembering the WPA code fot my network the issue seems to be purely a WEP issue. I will try the key chain utility when i get home fro work tonight.

was hoping that the security update might fix this bug but alas no!

After recovering from a bout of bad spelling yesterday I got home from work, deleted the keychain from my account, restarted the MB, opened network settings clicked on the advanced tab and filled in the network name and password fields, ticked remember password box and the MB connected to my network.

Then closed the MB to put it to sleep and opened it up again and it was still connected to my network, Issue resolved. I also verified the permissions in disk utility which helped as a bunch of permissions needed repairing.

If anyone else has the same problem with WEP then follow the above.

Thank you! Putting System Preferences.app back in /Apps fixed the problem for me. That is so annoying - Apple not using their own tools, and it's been this way with one app or another (esp. System Update) hard-coding paths since 10.0

I had to reconnect manually to my home wpa2 network every time my MB leopard woke up. Tried many of the tricks (delete and reset preferred networks, delete passwords from keychain, change user etc).


The only quirky fix was moving system preferences!


Thanks guys

I have exactly the same issue with WPA Enterprise passwords. I have repaired damage in my keychain, etc. There is nothing relating to my password saved in any keychain. 10.4.11 does not do this but 10.5.3 does.

Hope 10.5.4 fixes it.