apple
HowTo: Fix OS X’s self-assigned IP Problem
Posted by HokieTux on August 4, 2008 in Hacks
I recently came back to my old man’s place for a couple of days before we headed out on a vacation, and quickly discovered that my Macbook wouldn’t play nicely with his wireless network. My sister has an iMac that she struggled to make work with the wireless, but had forgotten what she had done to get it up and running.
The issue was that when I connected to the network, I had no actual internet access. I had an IP, and I could ping the router, but I couldn’t get anywhere else. Looking in network preferences, it said:
Airport has a self-assigned IP address and may not be able to connect to the internet.
I spent a good amount of time searching around online and digging through forums for a good fix. There seem to be a lot of different solutions out there, each of which work for a small percentage of the people with this problem.
The fix that ended up working for me was thus:
Add a ‘$‘ to the beginning of the WEP password.
No joke. I deleted the wireless network from the Airport preferences, reconnected to it, and prefaced the password with a dollar-sign… and it worked.
I hope this fix works for someone else out there with this problem. I also hope that Apple gets their shit together and fixes their broken network stack. OS X’s networking stack has always been weak, and Leopard was supposed to change all of that. I love my Mac, but come’on Apple – you can do better than this.
Helpful Threads If This Didn’t Work:
- http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=429435
- http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1111788&tstart=0
- http://ryanjbonnell.com/journal/self-assigned
