modems and connectin settings

[martinworswick]

hi,
i wonder if anyone with this problem,
my internal modem seems to have dissapeared, when i open up internet connect, bluetooth, airport and vpn are pesent but not my internal modem, it has always shown up ,up until now.
a second problem is that my connection settings keep disappearing, it has happened 3 times now when i open up internet connect there are no log in details or phone numbers.
i have them saved so its not such a big deal but its just irritating that it keeps happening and i dont know why not.
a third equqlly irritating problem is that when i type in the password for a connection it saves it but when i reuse that setting the password appears to have changed as there are several more asteisks.

please help
regards
martin

i'm using a 12" powerbook g4 running osx 10.3

 

[perfessor101]

The number of asterisks you see for a password entry in OS X has no relationship to the actual number of characters in the password itself. OS X lies about the number of characters in a password deliberately. It is a security measure to make it more difficult for someone to guess your password. So what you are seeing there is a non-issue.

Open Apple System Profiler and see if ASP sees your modem. If it doesn't you have a hardware problem. If it does see your modem then open System Preferences > Network and see if your modem shows up there. If it does not, then click on the Show: drop down and select Network Port Configurations and see if the modem shows up there. If it does and the checkbox is unchecked, then check it. If it does not appear click the New button and see if the port is seen at all.

As to your settings not sticking have you tried Repairing Permissions? That is not a panacea, but it is quick and easy to do and has been known to help situations such as this. If that doesn't help you may have a corrupted preference file. Preferential Treatment will check your preferences to be sure they are XML consistent -- but they can still be corrupted. In the second case all you can do is delete the preference files relating to modem and network port configuration.