Need Help - Airport Extreme Base Station Needs Daily Restarts

[Bruce Stewart]

I'm having an odd problem that just showed up for the first time a week ago
but won't go away. My Airport Extreme base station loses the WAN side
overnight. Using the Airport Admin Utility to restart the unit then restores
communications to the outside world.

I've tried most of the traditional maintenance and have even gone so far as
to reinitialize the base station and rebuild my system from scratch, but to
no avail.

Any thoughts would be welcomed. I'm not looking forward to an Apple support
call where it's "buy AppleCare" and "pay $49 to talk to me" on a four month
old device.

Many thanks in advance for any help that can be offered.
Bruce.

[Charles]

In article <0001HW.BB77576200242FB1F0080600@news.supernews.co m>, Bruce
Stewart <bruce@bastewart.com> wrote:

> I'm having an odd problem that just showed up for the first time a week ago
> but won't go away. My Airport Extreme base station loses the WAN side
> overnight. Using the Airport Admin Utility to restart the unit then restores
> communications to the outside world.

I had a similar problem of frequent restarts with my non-Apple wireless
router. In my case it was caused by momentary power glitches that you
hardly notice. Apparently, as explained to me, when the cable modem
went back on line it had a new DHCP lease, which is why the router had
to be reset. Putting it and the cable modem on a UPS solved the
problem.

--
Charles

[Dave Seaman]

On Sun, 31 Aug 2003 7:42:26 -0700, Bruce Stewart wrote:

> I'm having an odd problem that just showed up for the first time a week ago
> but won't go away. My Airport Extreme base station loses the WAN side
> overnight. Using the Airport Admin Utility to restart the unit then restores
> communications to the outside world.

> I've tried most of the traditional maintenance and have even gone so far as
> to reinitialize the base station and rebuild my system from scratch, but to
> no avail.

> Any thoughts would be welcomed. I'm not looking forward to an Apple support
> call where it's "buy AppleCare" and "pay $49 to talk to me" on a four month
> old device.

> Many thanks in advance for any help that can be offered.
> Bruce.

I have been seeing a similar problem lately with my Airport Extreme base
station. It was working fine up until about two weeks ago with my ADSL
line. Suddenly it began dropping the connection on the WAN side, often
overnight, but increasingly at other times. One time I had to restart it
three times within an hour.

I'm pretty sure there is more to it than just the base station. I tried
substituting an older graphite station for the extreme, with similar
results.

I have found, though, that I can keep the connection alive longer if I
keep a "ping" active. I run it with a 30-second delay and this seems to
help. It's not foolproof, but my connection tends to stay alive for
hours or days rather than minutes.

I also tried running without the base station and using "Sharing
Preferences" to share the connection via Airport. That at least partly
works -- I wasn't getting disconnects, but I was seeing unacceptable
packet losses at times. At least with the base station I don't see the
packet losses.


--
Dave Seaman
Judge Yohn's mistakes revealed in Mumia Abu-Jamal ruling.
<http://www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=228>

[Bruce Stewart]

On Sun, 31 Aug 2003 11:09:48 -0700, Dave Seaman wrote
(in message <bitdlc$qaq$1@mozo.cc.purdue.edu>):

[snip]

> I have found, though, that I can keep the connection alive longer if I
> keep a "ping" active. I run it with a 30-second delay and this seems to
> help. It's not foolproof, but my connection tends to stay alive for
> hours or days rather than minutes.
>

[snip]

Many thanks for the suggestions to date. In searching the Apple Discussion
Forums it seems there have been a slew of these problems, all with Airport
Extreme boxes, since the 3.1.1/5.1.1 update for Airport and the base station
code came out in August.

Two of the comments given there were to set the Airport Extreme to 802.11b
mode only, and to fix a channel (don't say automatic). I can tell you the
network still drops with those settings!

Bruce

[Bruce Stewart]

On Sun, 31 Aug 2003 8:24:27 -0700, Charles wrote
(in message <310820031124276813%fort@his.com.remove.invalid> ):

>
> I had a similar problem of frequent restarts with my non-Apple wireless
> router. In my case it was caused by momentary power glitches that you
> hardly notice. Apparently, as explained to me, when the cable modem
> went back on line it had a new DHCP lease, which is why the router had
> to be reset. Putting it and the cable modem on a UPS solved the
> problem.
>
>

Charles, that makes some sense, although the power seems rock solid here (I
have a very touchy phone that loses its date/time on any power wavering and
it hasn't so much as hiccoughed all month). Still a UPS is a good idea
anyway, and for some of the other equipment in the house, too. Thanks.