Well...here's a quandry:
Something's busted with my Airport. By Airport, of course, I mean my Graphite Base Station and/or Airport Card in my Pismo Powerbook.
Ever since Thursday afternoon, I've had huge swaths of time where I find that my Pismo simply can not locate an active wireless network. This, even when sitting directly next to the base-station.
I've had this base station and this Pismo for two years now (both purchased new at the same time) and have never had a single issue with this setup. None.
Until now.
Now, some of you may say, "Aha! A Graphite Base Station! Of course, those were lousy, troublesome machines. Those pesky capacitors! You know that Apple might replace it free of charge, don't you?"
To this, I would reply, "Ah...but the serial number of my base station is outside the range of serial numbers that Apple publically acknowledges they will replace; it doesn't exhibit the normal symptoms of flashing (or steady) red lights, and it responds perfectly normally to the Airport Admin Utility."
And, indeed, there are also times that I will have the same normal signal that I've always had. It will just spontaneously appear. Since last Thursday, I've had more downtime than uptime, but I managed a good two hours of uptime before the signal simply dropped out again last Saturday.
I know it's not a software issue because the same symptoms occur in Mac OS 9 as Mac OS X. I figure it could be one of a couple of things:
- It could be interference from an outside source that has just recently appeared. The problem with this theory is that I still don't get a signal, even with the Powerbook sitting directly next to the base station.
- It could be a hardware issue, either with the base station or the Airport card or the Powerbook itself. The problem with this theory is that all the hardware passes every test I can think to throw at it. The PowerBook sees the Airport card. The Hardware Test CD reports no errors. I've pulled the card and re-seated it. And, as I said before, the base station responds normally to the Airport Admin Utility. The LEDs even blink normally when there is other traffic running through my router.
So, the question remains: what could it be?
I'm in a hard spot here. I have no idea if it's a problem with the base station or the Powerbook/Airport Card. I have no other Airport-ready Mac available to me. I don't know of any other 802.11b networks around to test against. I'm really not sure where else to go from here.
So, for the time being, I'll probably be transferring my e-mail and whatnot to my desktop computer until I can get the reliability thing going again with my Powerbook's access.
Ah...the joys of technology.
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