Network Utility issue has me stumped...

[bpd115]

My uncle has an Aluminum iMac.

He called me earlier in the evening saying he couldn't get online. He's connected via ethernet. We reset everything and I had my dad over his house with his macbook air. My dad was on wireless no problem and the internet was fine.

I told my dad to bring up safari and iChat and we connected on his iMac. I used screen sharing and brought up network utility.

When I pulled up EN0 for ethernet, the hardware address would flicker between the MAC address and "Not Available" every min and a half or so.

So I'm thinking bad NIC?

I switched to FW1 (firewire network adapter) and it would do the same thing which threw a wrench in the works....

Something screwed up in software?

I plan on doing a time machine backup and installing Leopard from scratch. I was over his house last weekend and did the firmware update available for it but this is the first he had a problem with it.

Also, not once during the remote session/video chat did the internet connection drop even with it switching back and forth.

So, needless to say I'm stumped.

 

[ewilson6]

try another cable, try connecting through airport wireless, or try running network diagnostics...it will tell you exactly were the problem is.

--Eric

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

You could try using ifconfig in the terminal to view to MAC address. Try it once, and again every few seconds to see if it changes.

 

[ewilson6]

You don't ever have to mess with the terminal to check your internet connection, just run network diagnostics. Macs were made to be easy to diagnose.

Telling someone to enter commands in terminal is a waste of time.

Look at this picture, if there is not a green light on the diagnostics, that is where the problem is.

Take it from a Mac user of 25 years.

--Eric

 

[bpd115]

My problem is that for whatever reason, Network Utility is losing the mac address for a split second and saying "not available", then it snaps back.

It's doing it for not only the Ethernet adapter, but for the Firewire network adapter.

If it were a cable problem or a problem with the port on the router, you would think A) the only thing that would change is the "active/inactive" piece of the network utility screen, not the hardware address which should always be connected and B) the Firewire port shouldn't also exhibit the same behavior, telling me it's doubtful it's a faulty piece of hardware.

The interesting thing was the internet connection didn't drop during that period.