Billoblog ®

OK, I have had years of issues with AirPort wireless on my wife’s Macs, mostly when I switched my router from g to n. For my wife’s old MacBook, I ended up buying an AirPort Extreme router and putting it behind my regular router. It worked, but slowed things down and she had problems getting to our wireless printer. I assumed that a new MacBook Pro would do the job — all new firmware, new hardware, etc.

Well, it didn’t really fix things. Sure enough, every few hours the MacBook would drop signal. Hmmm…. I tried all sorts of stuff, to no avail. The only thing that really seemed to fix it was power cycling the router. Then one night I accidentally left my laptop on over night, and noticed the same sort of thing happening. The difference was that *my* laptop would drop signal for a few seconds and then come back up. If I wasn’t actively doing something on the net, I wouldn’t notice it, and I’m not constantly surfing. The difference was that when the Mac lost signal, it took *much* longer for it to reattach, and sometimes it didn’t do it all.

Well, this time, I didn’t power cycle the router, but instead managed to look at its logs. I had automatic time synchronization turned on. Every time the router went out to a timeserver and adjusted its time, it went down and came back up. I turned off the nntp option, and it’s been up ever since — well for two days. We’ll see in the future…

UPDATE: Well, it was improvement, but not perfect. I’ve gone from dropping every few hours to two times a day. I changed the router to not scan channels, but only use channel 8. That dropped it to once in a day.