On Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:38:41 -0400, Warren Oates
<warren.oates@gmail.com> wrote:
>They haven't complained since I rebooted the routers; I'll try all that
>next time they have problems. I've got the Dlink set to use Google's
>DNS, FWIw.
Well, that may have fixed it. Some of my routers have been up for
months and can probably run indefinitely. Others require daily
reboots. I wish I could see a pattern, but it seems random.
Google DNS is fine. That's what I like to use. Your other choices
are OpenDNS and DNS provided by your ISP. I would not expect any of
these to cause problems. Where I get into problems is when I use the
DNS cache in the router. That's where the DNS points to the IP
address of the router, instead of to Google DNS, OpenDNS, etc. Some
routers seem to make a mess of it, so rather than find one that
doesn't, I just avoid the problem and setup the client computah to
point directly to the DNS server. However, that implies tinkering
with the MacBook settings, so I don't think that's going to be usable.
>I don't think these guys are changing their MAC addresses; I doubt that
>they even know what that means.
You'll be surprised. I've seen the stranges things in coffee shops.
One lady was told by her son to "hit this icon when done" every time
she signed off. Among other things, it cleared her cache, and wiped
any evidence of having been there, but also changed the MAC address.
She understood that it was to improve privacy, which I guess fits.
Other than that, she had no idea what she was doing. Your visitor may
have the same situation.
>I went through the network settings, but only on one of their Macs (the
>MacBook as it happens, brand new just-out-of-box, and the papers were in
>order, as it were - no manual addresses set;
So much for that theory. It's possible we're creating a major problem
when the only thing that was really wrong was a confused wireless
router.
If it's working, don't touch it (or at least save the config file so
you can undo the damage).
>I'll check out the other
>Macs next time it happens; I'll start with his huge iMac. The Dlink
>reports the right number of IP addresses for the machines in use
>(including all of ours). The max is set for 99.
You could probalby get away with increasing the DHCP address pool to
about 250.
>> I've also had some weirdness convincing multiple Mac's to connect to
>> my WRT54G running DD-WRT. Some of them, just will not connect when I
>> use WPA2-AES, but work fine when set to WPA-TKIP. So, I have two
>> SSID's configured on my system. The 2nd one is named "Just-For-Macs".
>
>That's interesting. The Dlink is set for "WPA Personal" and "auto"
>TKIP/AES which has worked well up to now. The Engenius is set for
>"WPA-PSK-Mixed" and "auto" which seems to be the same thing.
Auto sorta works but tends to be a bit slow to connect. I don't know
exactly how it works, but my guess is that if AES fails, it falls back
to TKIP. How long that will take is unknown. On the WRT54G router I
mentioned, the main SSID is set to WPA2-AES+TKIP, which is the same as
'auto". It doesn't work with several Mac's in the office complex. I
haven't had time to troubleshoot the problem, and nobody seems
interested here. So, rather than fight it, I just created a WPA-TKIP
SSID, and ignored the problem.
>I could
>simplify it, I guess. I remember a couple of years ago Macs having
>problems with AES. I like the idea of separate SSIDs for Macs. I'm not
>sure how to do that, though. I'll dig into it.
<http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=DGL-4300>
<ftp://ftp.dlink.com/Gateway/dgl4300/Manual/DGL-4300_manual_06292005.zip>
A quick skim of the specs and the manual didn't find any mention of
multiple SSID's.
--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
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#
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