[superblue]

Having problems with Airport - I have two macs, one connected wirelessly, and one via ethernet. When I wake the Macs, only the Ethernet one has access to the network, the wireless one can't find the base station until it (the base station) has been restarted by the ethernetted mac. Once I've gone through this, both machines are fine until the next time I sleep and wake them up.

I've tried swapping the card between the macs and the problem continues. I'm really confused by it all - how can I identify the problem?

Everything's up to date - 10.2.2, Airport 4.0.7... Any help greatly appreciated!

[ghporter]

The problem is more likely in the computer that goes to sleep than with the base station. A lot of wireless cards, AirPort included, lose settings or associations when the computer goes to sleep. When you reset your base station, you make it send out signals that allow it to "discover" clients-like your wireless Mac.

Next time, instead of reseting your base, turn your computer off and then back on. If it finds the base right away, the problem is the AirPort card. I think there's a "power saving" option that you can turn off-that worked on my PCMCIA wireless card on a PC laptop.

[superblue]

Shutting down doesn't make any difference. One thing I noticed was that when booting up OSX, "Waiting for network initialization" paused for considerably longer than everything else.

When I scan for base stations from the wireless Mac in Airport Admin utility, nothing is found. When I scan for 'other' it has the base station's address in the first field, then I enter the password and it says "The Airport Admin Utility was unable to read the configuration of the selected base station. An error occurred while reading the configuration."

In Internet Connect, the network is selected, the Base Station ID is shown and the signal level is strong, but it says "Status: Status not unavailable"

There don't seem to be any power saving settings for the Airport card.

I've had Airport working fine for about 2 months, then all of a sudden (following upgrades to OSX 10.2.2 and Airport 4.0.7), this problem has started. Could the upgrades be the root of the problem?

[ghporter]

In a word, "yep." You have obviously eliminated the old "sleeping wireless card" issue, but since you only recently updated your software, it's far more likely to be the problem than any hardware. I would try to fall back with the AirPort software, and see if that is the culprit. While people have had various problems with OS X.xxx, I doubt it's that-the AirPort software is much more likely your problem.

[superblue]

well that's what I thought I'm currently ploughing through the Apple.com discussions and there are plenty of others out there experiencing similar problems... so fingers crossed it'll be addressed with an update before too long. Thanks for your thoughts.

[ghporter]

There's a possibility that Apple still has an older version of the AirPort software floating around. I don't remember whether or not you get a disc with AirPort software when you get the computer, or if they expect you to download your software... Anyway, an older version may work fine for you-most updates implement new features that not everyone uses.