Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mpulsive81

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 7, 2006
401
0
McKinney, TX
I am always on wifi and my airport works fine. when i tried to connect an ethernet cable to my macbook it wouldn't work. I made sure that it was set up for dhcp and it's able to pick up an ip address from the router but I can't get it working. Any ideas on what I could do? On a windows machine i'd uninstall/reinstall the nic from device manager, but i'm at a loss on what to do with a mac. I've tried multiple cables, so i know it's not the cable, i also know that it's not the router since i tried using multiple ports as well. It used to work, but it doesn't now. Ideas??
 
When an ethernet cable is plugged in, open up Network Utility, and under the "Info" tab select the en0 ethernet interface from the popup (it usually defaults to fw0, the firewire port, so make sure you do this). What does it say under Interface information?

That'll give a clue as to whether it's just having DHCP trouble or whether it's not even establishing a link.
 
I got the IP address of my router showing up (it's a belkin, so it's 192.168.2.1)
Link speed 100 Mb
Link Status Active
Vender Marvell
Model YukonGigabit Adapter 88E8053

On the right hand side i show that 100 packets were sent and 48 were received. When I go to System Preferences > Network and then when I select the ethernet port and at the bottom I click "assist me" it says that i'm connected to the internet but i may have typed www.apple.com wrong. Now i know i can be dumb but c'mon...none of my bookmarks work and i can't even get to my router through the ip address.
 
ok last troubleshooting thing i could think of was to try to isolate if it could be the router, although i can't see how. I plugged the modem directly to the macbook, removing the router from the picture and badabing! So wtf? My router sends it's connection to my xbox from any other port ( i tried them all ) so i'm kinda at a loss at what it could be.
 
First, it sounds like you ARE connected to the internet (certainly, you're connected to the internal network at least); the reason you're getting errors trying to access anything is one of two possibilities:

1) DNS issues; your router isn't passing (or your Mac isn't accepting) a valid DNS server address, and so you can't actually get to anything. This seems most likely.

2) Your router isn't passing internal network traffic to the internet. Not sure what would cause this unless you've done some weird configuration stuff.

Direct connection to the modem would solve either problem, so that's why it worked that way.

Easy enough to check which, though:

First, try going to 17.112.152.32 in a web browser--that should be apple.com's IP address, and I believe it will resolve properly. If you get nothing from that, traffic isn't getting through your router, so time to start looking at its detailed settings (maybe do a factory reset or something). If it comes up fine, it's a DNS problem.

Second, try going to the Network Pref Pane on your Mac and manually enter the DNS servers at http://www.opendns.com/ (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220) in the DNS Servers section and click Apply Now.

If apple.com suddenly starts working, then it's a DNS issue.

If it is a DNS issue, check your router's settings and make sure it doesn't have something weird hardwired. If not, maybe just use those OpenDNS ones, or manually enter your ISP's DNS servers on your Mac; there shouldn't really be any disadvantage from either.
 
ok well i'm just plum stumped. I bypassed the router and connected mac > modem and it worked fine. So I completely reset my router back to factory settings, and set up the configuration again and i still have the same connection issue.

Now when i say i set up the configuration again, what i do is set up the UDP & TCP for my xbox 360 and transmission program. I leave it as DHCP and I have a WPA-PSK security. (I also tried disabling security) I have my firewall disabled.............


NEVERMIND scratch all this, i'm a genius (sarcasm)! I can't believe what it was....

Before I relocated my router closer to my xbox i was sharing out my internet connection through my ethernet port, making my Macbook a $1200 wifi adapter. I can't believe that's all it was, it's been so long since I reconfigured my setup that I totally forgot about that. (this might explain why my battery life sucked too!) I'm so sorry! :eek:
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.