MacBook to a Buffalo wireless hub. Connects but gets no further.

[Teflon Mac]

I can't figure out how to get my new MacBook wirelessly online and any suggestions would be welcome. Here's the situation...

I have an existing network (described below) which works fine with a couple of different Windows XP machines connecting wirelessly with Dell TrueMobile wireless LAN cards. With the MacBook I can connect to the Wireless hub but there seems to be something blocking any traffic to and from the Mac when connected wirelessly. (Wired connection to the MacBook ethernet port works fine, so I don't think it is anything to do with firewall settings on the Mac).

I know the MacBook connects wirelessly since (i) on the Mac the status shows as connected, and (ii) the wireless hub logs each connection/disconnection from the Mac. However if try to ping anything in the LAN network from the wirelessly connected Mac, all I get is "Host down" or "No route to host". I looked at the network traffic using tcpdump while doing the pings and the only traffic is outbound ARP "who_has" requests. Nobody replies to the ARP requests, so of course the Mac's networking is hosed even though it is connected to the wireles hub.

This screams of a wireless hub/ rest of the network configuration issue but the Windows machines connect fine in this environment so there's clearly something I haven't understood.

Network diag:

ADSL==Firewall==LAN switch==(via Ethernet)==Wireless Hub

Firewall: OpenBSD
LAN Switch: Dell Powerconnect 2224
Wireless Hub: Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 in bridge mode. It's got the latest firmware (1.38 IIRC)
MacBook: running OS X 10.4.6 (also just tried 10.4.7) with an inbuilt Airport Extreme card at rev level 0.1.20

The Wireless Hub has some ethernet ports so I did try connecting the firewall directly to the Wireless hub but no difference.

Any suggestions? Would you expect replacing the Buffalo with an Airport Extreme base station to work?

Thanks.

 

[Teflon Mac]

Update

A quick update...

...I did try swapping the Buffalo for an AirMac Extreme base station.

The Mac worked straightaway no problems (it took less than 5 minutes to configure the base station to fit my existing network); now the PCs are having difficulty connecting to the AirMac Extreme (though these problems seem completely different from the original Mac to Buffalo).

One difference in the original to current setup is that in the original setup the Mac had a manually assigned IP address and in the new setup the AirMac extreme is a DHCP server and the Mac uses DHCP. (This is 'cos I couldn't figure out how to manually assign IP addresses to both the Mac and the base station). I'm not sure that I can replicate that functionality with the Buffalo but if stuck with the same situation I would definitely try to get the Buffalo to DHCP serve the Mac.

I'm pretty interested to hear of success stories with Mac and Windows clients to the same wireless hub/router. There must be thousands of hotspots doing this everyday without any problems.

Cheers

 

[Tubedriven]

I am having the exact same problem. I have six PC's connecting just fine to two Buffalo WAPs in bridge mode, but the Mac Books will not work. The Macs say they are connected to the wireless network, but are not sending any traffic.