yeh I have MANY problems with my airport connection, most notably dropping connections as well as the speed slowdown. until 10.2, there would also be really bad problems with DNS lookups, console log would complain failed connections.
the dropped connections i attribute to encasing an 802.11b adapter inside pure titanium. the firewall problem though is believable, although ipfw is pretty good under the bsd implementations. either way, i gave up on the whole thing and have just been using my external orinoco card using the mac wireless driver extentions on sourceforge - http://wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net . it works rather well, and hopefully the maintainer will add rfmon support soon so as to support kismet/airsnort. mac's are cool, but theres nothing more fustrating than dropped/slow connections killing ssh tunnels. -a At 04:52 PM 10/16/2002, you wrote: >>From MacFixit... > >Slow Internet Speeds with AirPort Connection and Firewall Enabled > >A former Apple employee offers verification of a problem causing slow >Internet speeds with broadband connections through routed through AirPort >base stations when a Firewall is enabled [on OS X]. > >"After speaking directly with Apple's technical support, including an Apple >product specialist, there seems to be a potential software glitch with Mac >OS X v10.2.1 when people enable their OS X Firewall and are using AirPort >(Graphite and Snow base stations appear to be affected). People connected to >broadband (cable, DSL, etc.) may experience slow connectivity after a reboot >if they are using the OS X 10.2 Firewall." > >"The problem is as follows: when the 10.2 Firewall is enabled, a broadband >Internet connection can become randomly slow after a reboot (the problem is >intermittent), dropping down to speeds slower than 56 K. Using the >'permissions repair' feature of Disk Utility seems to temporarily alleviate >the problem, but it will return after successive reboots." > >Chris G. tested the problem on an iBook and a Power Mac G4 Desktop, yielding >the following results: > >"After personally experiencing this problem for about a week (shortly after >installing 10.2.1 and the latest 2.1.1 AirPort software updates), I >reinstalled 10.2 from scratch, then ran all the updates using software >update, which went fine. > >"However, after a few reboots, the problem surfaced yet again, as I had to >run the permissions repair and then reboot my Power Mac to bring my net >connection back up to its 3 Mbps speed. Note that the problem was further >isolated to the firewall as my iBook (connected to the same AirPort >network), would download and identical file from an identical location at >speeds 50x faster than my G4 (which is directly underneath my base station, >the iBook is about 50 feet away). I do not use the firewall on my iBook, and >since my troubleshooting work have disabled the firewall feature on my G4 >system and have not experienced the slow connectivity problems since doing >so." > >-- >general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> >[un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
