Airports, Routers, iBooks and Powerbooks

It started with an iBook, a G4, 14" to be specific. My son said he was dropping off the wireless network, and we did a few things to try to get it fixed, including a PRAM reset and a PMU reset. It seemed to work, but got worse, and finally we just retired the thing when he got a new MacBook Pro. Recently I did a wipe and clean OS install on the iBook, and the same thing happened, except now, it wouldn't get on at all.

To be clear, the problem was not that the Airport card wouldn't see the wireless network- it could, and the signal strength was fine. The problem was that once you got on the network, you couldn't get onto the internet.

Then, my wife's 15" G4 Powerbook had a power supply issue, and the battery tanked. After taking care of that, when I booted it up it did the exact same thing- it saw the network but wouldn't see the internet.

After searching Google eleventy million times for every variation of "airport, router, internet, powerbook" I found this thread, from TechArena: "Powerbook G4 does not connect to router".

I tried, or had tried, everything on that list, with no success, except the idea of blowing out the wireless network in the router and starting fresh. I had resisted doing that simply because the network worked fine with my Macbook, and I didn't want to mess THAT up... but the fact that these two machines could see the router- but every time I went into Network Preferences and tried to get the DHCP settings right, I got some very weird looking addresses- made me think that there had to be some issue with the communication between these specific cards and the connection between the wireless and the router itself.

I'm running the Verizon MI424WR Router, by the way. And when I plugged the ethernet cable directly into the router I got access, and good DHCP addresses. Everything pointed to something inside the router not playing nice with the wireless signal from either of these machines.

So, finally, I blew out the old wireless network and made a new one. This is a process of plugging into the router, accessing the router interface by putting the "router address" into the browser bar, and then logging in with your user and password. I turned wireless off, then closed the screen. I re-opened, then turned it on with a new name and password. I crossed my fingers.

Both machines were all better. Bingo.