upgrading modem fixed Leopard Airport connection problem

[magsterz]

For what it's worth, I just solved my Airport connection problem which emerged after upgrading to Leopard. Many people have had numerous issues with wireless connection with Leopard and my experience may only be relevant to a few. After upgrading, I could see my wireless modem but would be asked for a password, which was unnecessary since I hadn't had one before. I thought the issue was an old modem, and I went out and bought a Netgear router, since my stepson has no problems connecting to a Netgear router with Leopard. But then I went through the setup and, while I was then able to see my signal, I was getting authentication errors.

So I called Verizon (their Mac people are very helpful!) and it turns out I didn't need a new router, I just needed to upgrade the firmware for my Westell Versalink 327W modem. I suggest contacting your provider and have them walk you through the upgrade process, but the basic steps for me were:

going to http://gonow.page.tl/ and downloading a Westell upgrade

going to http://192.168.1.1/ and walking through the setup process there, and when it came time for the software upgrade, I uploaded the .upg file that I had just downloaded from the previous page.

Maybe I'm not having any issues because I'm not bothering with security passwords, and I'm not using a router but just a basic DSL modem, I don't know.

But I thought this might help someone...

 

[scaredpoet]

Funny think about that Westell VersaLink 327W: I had the exact opposite problem. When I upgraded to the latest Verizon firmware for my 327W, my Leopard Macs and my iPhone all stopped working and would not connect. I had to track down the original factory firmware on the westell site, install that, and then things were fine again.

Unfortunately, I also learned during this process that there are at least three hardware revisions of the 327W. They look the same on the outside, but have different internals and take different firmware updates. They even have different capabilities: one revision cannot do WPA encryption, while another version does it, but can't handle DMZ properly, while the third does both correctly but has occasional stability issues. So a solution that fits one 327W may not fit the other two.

If It weren't for the IP passthrough capability of the router (the one thing I need and the Versalink does very well), I would have trashed this DSL router long ago.

And don't get me started on why I'm not using cable broadband. It's a long story.