SBC Yahoo DSL with Airport Extreme

jimpond · #1 December 12th, 2005, 11:30 AM

Hello,

I currently have a Powerbook G4 and Airport Extreme Base Station. The base station is connected to a Speedstream modem and my service provider is SBC Yahoo DSL.

I have the base station set to connect via PPoE and I have connect "Using DHCP" selected in the Powerbook's system preferences. I have also downgraded the Base Station firmware to 5.5.1 as I heard that it is more reliable with SBC DSL.

However, I still have a problem where my Base Station loses the internet connection intermittently. This requires me to power cycle the Base Station, after which the connection is restored.

Do you know of any other solutions or why I might be losing my connection so frequently?

Thank you in advance for any help.

Jim

gsahli · #2 December 12th, 2005, 11:39 AM

As a troubleshooting step, connect your computer to the DSL modem (and set up PPPoE on it), to see if eliminating the Base Station gets rid of the problem.

jimpond · #3 December 13th, 2005, 10:29 PM

Thanks for the reply. I have no problems losing the Internet connection when I connect the dsl directly to the Powerbook.

dmcc · #4 December 14th, 2005, 01:33 PM

The same thing is happening to me! I have a new Mac mini. When I connect directly to the DSL modem it works fine. I bought a Linksys WRT54G v5 router, connects for a short period of time then loses connection. I have to unplug everything power cycle the router. I have a builtin Airport and have it setup using DHCP (that while directly connected to modem works fine). Any solutions???

buglerb · #5 December 20th, 2005, 07:36 PM

I have the same problem as Jim. I get a strong signal on my powerbook G4 from my airport extreme, but it won't connect to the internet. I've given up on getting help from SBC on this. With three computers at home, switching cables has reached it's end! Any help in resolving the connection problem will be appreciated (btw Apple gave me a new modem to ensure that was not the problem and it is not). - Buglerb sends

dmcc · #6 December 20th, 2005, 11:11 PM

I found somewhat of a solution... I originally had the linksys setup with the MAC addr of my PC. I changed the MAC addr to that of my mini... PRESTO! I was able to connect to the internet for more than 5 mins. But, I also found out that when I start to connect to the internet, I need to immediately renew my DHCP session or tag. If I don't the mini will stop communicating and I then have to power cycle the linksys. This was while being wired. I have since switched over to the airport and have experienced the same conditions. I would guess that the MAC looks for the MAC addr info and the DHCP tag, if it doesn't like it it just shuts down. The PC (not that I'm patting it on the back) doesn't care. I think that the linksys might not be as strict as the Apple product. There is a timer that according to the linksys help can be set to the value 99999 which I believe to be forever, you cannot change it to anything beyond 3600.

gsahli · #7 December 20th, 2005, 11:25 PM

That sounds like that's the problem. You aren't supposed to change the MAC address of the router - you're supposed to set the router up to do the PPPoE authentication all on its own and then your computers don't do any authentication, but are just clients of the router.

Have I misunderstood what you are doing?