Macbook Pro vs. Linksys Router

Between my wife and I we have 3 Macs. She has a Blackbook and I have a Macbook Pro and a Whitebook from work. The two Macbooks have been connecting just fine to our Linksys router for quite some time. I don’t have any sort of encryption, as our nearest neighbors are too far out of range. I’ve setup MAC address filtering and disabled SSID broadcasts. Nothing too fancy. Well, as of late I’ve been having issues with the Macbook Pro. I could start the machine up, connect to the router and surf for about 5 minutes. Then my conneciton would drop to nil and the Airport icon would show zero bandwidth. It would also choke if I put the MBP to sleep and latter tried to reconnect. So I tried everything to fix this problem. Fixed permissions, reinstalled security updates, updated the router’s firmware, changed channels on the router, updated the OS and everything else you could possilbly think of. Except for one thing.

I didn’t reset the router back to it’s default settings.

So tonight, after literally a week of banging my head against a wall (Cause after all the 2 Macbooks were working. Why wasnt’ the Pro? What is going on? It doesn’t make sense! AHHHHHHHH!!!) I’ve finally fixed my wireless issue. I’m now slowly tweaking the router, adding the MAC filtering and tweaking other various settings. We’ll see how long this lasts so cross your fingers.

Sidenote: Along my journey into wireless hell I came across a very ‘perplexing’ entry in both the system and console logs:

Jun 19 21:41:05 Chris-Computer mDNSResponder: getifaddrs ifa_netmask for fw0(7) Flags 8863 Family 2 169.254.129.184 has different family: 0
Jun 19 21:41:05 Chris-Computer mDNSResponder: SetupAddr invalid sa_family 0

I have no idea what this means. It’s talking about DNS entries for the Firewire port or some such nonsense. But in the Network Preference Pane I don’t have the Firewire port active. Curiouser and curiouser!

6 thoughts on “Macbook Pro vs. Linksys Router”

  1. Regarding:

    Jun 19 21:41:05 Chris-Computer mDNSResponder: getifaddrs ifa_netmask for fw0(7) Flags 8863 Family 2 169.254.129.184 has different family: 0
    Jun 19 21:41:05 Chris-Computer mDNSResponder: SetupAddr invalid sa_family 0

    Have you recently installed Parallels Desktop on Chris-Computer? I started receiving those same messages about the time I installed my copy…

  2. You know I’ve had Parallels installed for a while now, but I did just upgrade to the newest release. Perhaps this is Parallels related. I’ll look into it. Thanks!

  3. I am having the exact same issue with my MacBook Pro vs Linksys Router.

    Right now, I am connected to the wifi part of the router .. ^H^H^H

    It dropped again 🙁

    Did a full reset of the router fix your issues?

    Yes, I do have parallels 3.0, and no, disabling all Parallels Bluetooth Firewire does nothing for the stability.

    Pinging the router gives me ~60% packet loss and avg response of about 2 seconds … so obviously, I am not impressed.

  4. Oh, I guess it’s everything wifi on that linksys router that’s gone bad. My Xbox 360 can’t connect anymore either, so I guess it’s time to get that shiny Airport Extreme now, and kindly donate this Linksys router to someone else 😉

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