Fun With Home Networking

I've previously written about problems trying to setup Wireless Printing at Home. I got to revisit that today.

OS X 10.4.3 came out and went pretty smoothly for me but I found reconnecting to my home network when waking the laptop up from sleep was now slower and didn't always work. So I did some searches and there have been a number of problems with 10.4.3, great. I also installed the AirPort update 2005-001 which was supposed to improve interoperability with 3rd party routers (I have a D-Link DI-524), but it didn't.

I did find that my router had a fireware upgrade out, so I tried that. Of course I forgot that the upgrade also deletes all configuration information...without warning. So I reconfigure things. My AirPort wasn't connecting but my PowerBook was. Then I turned on encryption and things weren't so smooth again. The new feature in the firmware upgrade was WPA2 support (better encryption) but even though the PowerBook said it supported it, it didn't work. I got the PowerBook working with the older WPA encryption, though it was still slow when waking. Now I had to make the AirPort work. After a lot of failed attempts I finally reset it and got it configured to connect to my network without encryption.

Now everything works great. When I wake up the PowerBook it can see the AirPort. So the original problem was of course encryption. Products made by two different companies (D-Link and Apple) both claim to support WPA (1 and 2) encryption but don't work together. Standards suck and security sucks. I'll make due with MAC filtering for now. I can probably solve the problem by buying an AirPort Extreme (I need that version to connect my PC via an ethernet cable) but really $200 for that when my D-Link cost $20. Then again, today was another 4 hours of my life wasted configuring a home network.