1

We have a office with a wireless router - whenever a particular Mac laptop comes in the wireless router needs to be rebooted.

Does anyone know the cause of this?

Chealion
  • 5,733
  • 28
  • 29
Hawkeye
  • 2,699
  • 9
  • 30
  • 35

5 Answers5

8

Have you attempted to capture the network traffic at the time using a tool such as Wireshark? What kind of router, and what kind of Mac?

There are several possible things to look at:

  1. The router firmware - is there an update?
  2. IPv6 - try disabling it on the Mac to see if the router dislikes any IPv6 traffic
  3. mDNS / Bonjour - I have seen el cheapo consumer routers react poorly to Bonjour traffic (or broadcast traffic of any kind). Needless to say the hardware didn't last long as any traffic from any device caused issues.
  4. DHCP - Where is the DHCP request coming from?
  5. n,a,b, or g - Try changing the type of connection and data rate if applicable.

Either way it sounds like the router has some kind of odd issue.

Chealion
  • 5,733
  • 28
  • 29
1

Latest mac/apple devices (iphone, laptops, notebooks etc.) tend to flood routers with packets when connecting to the wireless connection. The reason behind this is that these equipments are not created to use a WEP security encryption for the wireless connection. Work round for this is to change the wireless security of the router preferably WPA-PSK, as long as it's not set to WEP-security it should be fine. Hope this help guys.^_^

1

I can't even begin to offer an explanation but would suggest you concentrate your efforts on the wireless router. Regardless of what any of the clients do the router should not crash.

John Gardeniers
  • 27,458
  • 12
  • 55
  • 109
0

What kind of router is this? I had a mac laptop once that would lock up a netgear router due to too many tcp requests at once. It would die once I tried to open too many browser tabs at once and overload the router bringing it too a stop and requiring a reset to come back. It was an older netgear router that hasn't seen a firmware update in years and was at the newest available.

Troggy
  • 1,345
  • 2
  • 14
  • 16
-1

There are lots of Google hits on "N" Belkin routers with fireware issues and problematic chipsets and OS X that crash and lockup. Search for your router model number....

markratledge
  • 519
  • 5
  • 13
  • 26