Mac Forum / General / Networking / August 2004

This is just a recent happening. My network, with all the same
configurations, has been working prfectly for a few years at least.

I have a graphite base station with 6 computers connected to cable
modem. Just in the past week or so SOME of the airport machines have
almost stopped connecting entirely, the connection is so slow. (e.g.,
downloading file with a wired ethernet connection takes 40 sec; on the
same machine with airport it's 13 hours). Most sites timeout before
fully connecting. File sharing between machines is glacial.

Here's the connection: cable modem to ethernet hub, base station and
wired connections connected to hub as well.

Here's the breakdown: all 10.2.8 (beige desktop G3, iBook G3, iBook
Clamshell) machines connect perfectly, either wired or airport (the
beige G3 of course has no airport capability). G4 iBook connects
perfectly with wire; slow connection with airport. G4 mirror-door
desktop is the same. (Both airport extreme cards, both 10.3.5).

Here's the really bizarre part: the SAME G4 mirror-door desktop, booted
into 10.2.8 from a second HD, works perfectly both wired and airport.
When the first HD was downgraded to 10.3.4, still a slow airport
connection. Finally, a G4 Cube (original airport 802.11b card; 10.3.5)
works perfectly both wired and airport.

All machines have all software updates applied, base station has all
updates applied, all machines have had fsck run and permissions
repaired and caches flushed. The poor connecters are unaffected by
either manual or DHCP IP addresses. There's no phone interference, no
encrytption, no other users on the network, no other networks nearby to
interfere. The results above are consistent and reproducible over and
over, so it's not just random flakiness in the base station or network.
All machines worked perfectly with airport connections until a week or
so ago.

I see no pattern to try to isolate the problem (except Airport Extreme
cards in combination with some version of Panther).

What can be causing this?