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I'm having a frustrating connection problem with an iBook, OS X 10.5.8. It connects fine to other wireless routers but at home it has suddenly stopped connecting to the ActionTec router after connecting fine for years. Other people in the apt connect to the router just fine.

Here's what I have tried with no success:

  • power-cycled router
  • changed SSID
  • changed WPA passphrase
  • changed between WPA and WPA2
  • rebooted iBook
  • thrown out the following:
    /Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist /Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.internetconnect.plist /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
  • Deleted all entires for the network in the keychain

We can disable the security on the router and it connects fine but obviously that is not a solution. Unfortunately I am not as familiar with troubleshooting wireless on OS X and there is no good diagnostics that I am aware of, we go to the wireless menu, select the network name and we get the box that asks for a WPA passphrase and then immediately get a message "Connection Failed"

Any other suggestions would be much welcomed! Thanks

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Are there any interesting messages in the console -- launch /Applications/Utilities/Console.app? Have you tried a wired connection between this machine and the router? – Doug Harris Dec 17 '10 at 18:37
Are software updates available? What generation iBook is it? – Daniel Beck Dec 17 '10 at 20:52
Wired connection works fine. I will look at the console. Updates are a good question will run that too and report what I find. – jemerick Dec 20 '10 at 2:24
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I made a few changes in the wireless setup and eventually got it working.

E.g. I changed the encryption type from 'TKIP' to 'AES'.

I also changed the security type from 'WPA or WPA2 - Personal' to 'WPA-Personal'.

The first thing I noticed is that it started saying 'connection timeout' instead of 'failed'

then, miraculously, after saying 'failed' a few more times, it connected.

Hope this helps.

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