A recurring frustration chez Tosh is the Wifi, provided by Apple’s Airport kit. It seems this is one area where Apple simply hasn’t cracked ease of use even for someone who, like me, has been using it since version 1. It’s tricky to set up, and it just breaks sometimes, for no obvious reason.
But – today – a breakthrough, after days of frustration, which I share here for the benefit of my regular reader and those irregular ones who pop in via the Google.
If you’re not struggling with your wifi setup, don’t read the rest of this; life’s too short. If you are struggling with your wifi network, do read this… it might have the bit of information you need, and life’s too short to mess around with these things for too long.
To explain: we use ADSL, and the telephone line enters the house in our living room,
where there’s a modem connected by Ethernet cable to an Airport
Express base station.
My main computer in the house lives in my study, which is a floor above
and to the back of the house. This isn’t an enormous house, really – it
just has some thick walls, so a second Apple Airport Express unit, living just the other side of that thick wall in the study, is
needed to bring the Wifi through with sufficient strength for my desktop computer.
Normally, this arrangement works fine; Wifi through the house, good
speeds and no problems despite a lot of Wifi users in the houses
nearby. But, for no clear reason, occasionally it all stops working.
You can run up and down stairs restarting things (and sometimes that
works) but often it doesn’t.
Why? Who knows. You just want to get things going again. And, having wasted quite a lot of time trying to resurrect things of late, I’d like to help you avoid losing hours you’ll never get back. Here are five quick suggestions…
1/ Just hit reset
You could use Apple’s Airport Admin Utility to inspect things and
try to tweak your Apple base stations back to health. I wouldn’t bother. Instead, reset your Airports -
on Airport Express they’re the little grey buttons handily placed on
the underside of the unit, which is impossible to turn upside down
unless you unplug the whole unit. For the reset to work, however, you
need to keep it plugged in, so either climb under it so you can see the
tiny button (you’ll need a pin or thin-nibbed pen to poke it) or
temporarily relocate it to a bar socket so you can easily press it in. The light will flash after a few seconds – that’s it reset. Now you can either get up off the floor, or
put the unit back in its normal location.
2/ Airport Admin Utility vs Airport Setup Assistant
Use Airport Setup Assistant to get
things going again – it’s more friendly than the Airport Admin Utility. When you load that up, first do the setup work on your primary Airport -
the one your modem plugs into (you might want to turn off any other Airport Express units you have, so it’s easy to spot the right one to work with). Just follow the menus – this should be
simple. But make sure your modem is plugged in, and turned on…
3/ Moving on to the remote base station…
Then, you need to set up the remote Airport base station to extend
the network’s range. To do this, first switch it on.
4/ Sit between the base stations…
Then you’ll need to do the work of setting
it up (again, using Airport Setup Assistant) within range of both the main base station (the one you’ve just got going) and
the base station you’re wanting to get going. In my case, it meant
sitting on the stairs between the two Airports. Otherwise, I discovered, you’ll
struggle to get a connection with the main base station, which is
something your computer needs to do during the setup process.
5/ Be careful what you ask for
When using Airport Setup Assistant to sort out the remote base stations, be sure to specify that you want the remote Airport base stations -
the ones extending the network out – to join an existing network,
and that they’re extending the range – not just playing music or
allowing access to the printer.
Good luck!
Thank you – carefully del.icio.used for the next crisis!
You think that’s bad. Try using Linksys on a mac setup. Was suggested to me on the basis of cost – hah! – ended up costing me more – and certainly more in terms of time as the initial configuration can’t be done on a mac as there’s no software for it (PC only).
I now have a setup with two Linksys boxes (one for wifi and one for Vonage phone) and the thing isn’t password protected and I don’t even want to dare going near it all to sort it out (but I really should).
Great advice — and you might just be the person I need to help me with my wireless conumdrum! I think the thing has me confused before I’ve started because I don’t understand the basics.
I’m trying to connect to my iMac, wirelessly, to my new Sky Broadband. At the moment I’m using an ethernet cable and it’s OK.
I’ve got an AirPort Extreme card in my iMac. So … do I need the AirPort basestation as well? Don’t think I’ve quite grasped the basics, do you?
And I must agree with Craig — I had the devil of a time trying to network two macs through a Linksys router. Gave up in the end.
Hi Jane – yes, you need an airport base station. You could get an Airport Express base station, into which you plug your Ethernet cable and then use Airport Setup Assistant to sort out. Our you could buy an Airport Extreme base station – faster, but more expensive, and no harder to set up. Despite the names of each gadget, both will work with the card in your iMac.
Neil, thanks for that! So nice to get a straightforward explanation.
Though I was hoping for a less expensive answer! Hey ho.
Still, I suppose I need to work out whether it’s worth going wireless. Someone told me that you can lose the connection and lose data if you’re transfering files. Is that true?
Frankly, I’d love to get rid of ALL wires and cables.
I share your frustrations with this Neil. I’m on my third Airport Extreme (the new version). The first one failed for unknown reasons after about a year and I returned the second because it behaved oddly only to find that the replacement behaves the same.
The new one is invisible to both of my mac book pros but isn’t, I gather from the flashing lights on my airport and cable modem at all hours of the day and night, invisible to my neighbours.
Now, I don’t mind having to manually tell my macs the name of my network, nor do I mind sharing my excessive bandwidth with my neighbours. But I do mind the fact that I have no control whatsoever over my Airport Extreme. If I set a password it crashes the airport. If I mess with any of the settings it crashes the airport. If I even try to give it a fancy name it crashes the airport. So I have an open wifi network not by choice but because I can’t get it to work otherwise.
Have you heard about any other options working well or are all wifi routers flakey like this?
Jane – I’ve been wireless for years now, pretty much since the first Airport came out, and am fairly wedded to the notion of being able to use a computer wherever I fancy. It makes a big difference to the utility of your computer and its connection.
Robin – feel your pain. But my experience (via friends – like Craig, above in the comments) of non-Airport systems is that they’re even worse
I have a new i-Mac connected to BT internet via their router which has worked fine, until recently! I can now see the networks but can’t connect, its as if the WEP password is wrong, but its the one I have always used, very bizarre
Thank you!
After a year of airport bliss I just lost the ability to log into my own network for the first time, and after turning off & on my computer, modem and aiport express without improvement – I had no idea what to do. Lucky I had my iphone. Quick web search bought me here and your step 1 fixed everything.I ‘d never even noticed it had a reset button! CHEERS!
I certainly wish someone would have told me that Mac’s don’t work with linksys a week ago. It would have saved me a LOT of frustration.
Of course, all of the guys at the computer store assured me ANY wifi router would work with my Mac.
I won’t be going back there again. Thanks for the info in this article. Very helpful