ksmith | Victory is mine!

I have my wireless internet back. And I did it myself.

After a week of diddling with a wired connection, I couldn't stand it anymore. I phoned Apple, and waited about 10-15 minutes to be connected with a tech. First thing he had me do was, ta da, unplug my cable modem to clear it out (something I had already done, like, 10 times but oh well). This meant also pulling the back-up battery, which meant we would lose phone connection. I gave him the number to call me back, and went ahead and shut down the modem. Fired it up, and waited.

After about a half hour, I decided the odds were slim that Tech would call back. I futzed around with Airport Utility for a while. The issue seemed to be that my IP address was screwed up. Instead of xx.yyy.zzz.aa, it was xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa. Maybe there are 12-digit IP addys out there, but I don't recall ever seeing one before. I unplugged the base station, reset the cable modem again. Lost my hardwire connection in the process, and swore not-so-softly to myself until I remembered that under certain circumstances, I needed to reset the modem using the reset button in the back. Unplugging and pulling the battery wasn't enough. Then I wondered if I needed to do the same thing when I reconnected the cable to the base station. Decided I had nothing to lose and gave it a shot.

I honestly don't know what worked, but I think the reset did it. I got the little solid steady green light on the base station, and Airport Utility said I was connected, there were no issues, and wireless was good to go. Except that it wasn't because I still had the screwed-up IP address.

So I went to Network, Location, and on a hunch picked my very first location, which I had been using when everything went south. Those settings worked. I was wireless again.

I can't believe how dependent I've become on the flexibility of a wireless connection.