Wearing a new Mac with the DG394PN Router
Friday, March 21st, 2008Finally giving into the four-year urge to buy a Mac after this month’s refresh, I’ve had no end of troubles. It seems like I happen to have a router from the one range that Macs don’t play well with.
Connecting to my network
Just would not work. For two hours. Two whole hours. I eventually traced it to the MAC filtering on my router. I’m not sure why Macs and MAC filtering can’t go together. Turning off MAC filtering (which I planned to do anyway, in favour of WPA security) sorted the problem out straight away. There are still days where the Mac takes a minute or so to connect, but considering the boot time of a Mac is about 10 seconds, compared to my old PC laptop’s 6 minutes, I’m willing to forgive.
Connecting to MSN
Turns out Netgear DG934PN firmware 1.05.36 has a bug in it which conspires to not allow clients on the network to connect to MSN via anything but sucky, sucky HTTP. The official Windows client is robust enough for me to have never noticed. Adium was not. A painful downgrade experience to 1.05.35 fixed this.
Not without me checking my laptop thoroughly, trying three or four different clients, checking with my ISP…
What’s Left?
Things left to do:
- Figure out where my install of Java went to.
- Figure out how to tag my MP3s automatically and download album art.
- Figure out how to stop looking so damn cool with the pro balanced on my lap.