from Amazon, or check out the OS X 10.5.2 is here and it totally messes up my AirPort/WiFi! | February 12, 2008
First the good… 10.5.2 fixes almost all the initial interface issues, that most people had. The transparent menu bar never bugged me as much as others (I did select a background image with this a a consideration though), however now you can toggle that. Stacks seem to be mostly fixed (though you still can’t traverse aliased folders in “List” view). Finally the Time machine Menubar Item is nice and should have been there all along. All good things.
Now the very ugly… I can no longer find my WiFi network at work, not at all! In my last post I noted that there were issues connecting to the Fortinet FortiWiFi 50B at work. This was annoying, but there were workarounds, in fact switching from WEP to WPA (as things should have been to begin with) seemed to solve the problem entirely. However, after applying the 10.5.2 update, things are now worse then ever. My MacBook Pro doesn’t even see the WiFi network, making it impossible to connect no matter what security is used (even with none at all). Now there are many issues with this problem:
- There is clearly something unique going on with the FortiWifi unit, since I’ve never had these issues with numerous brands of WiFi routers all over the world. Attempting to contact Fortinet for an answer futile, as it seems there support, from my experience, represents the worst of the worst. (Why anyone would pay three to five times more for a WiFi router from a company that sucks this bad is beyond me. They have a reputation for excellent security, which is always welcome, of course making your network totally unreachable from with-in or with-out, while effective, isn’t what I think anybody wants. Plus… and this is real fun, after pay way to much for the hardware, you have to keep paying them for software updates, support, and everything else. Oy!… there is more, I could go on for awhile panning Fortinet, especially as a Mac user, but I’ll move on.)
- Apple has to share in the blame here though. First of all while there were issues with WEP connections to the FortiWiFi in 10.5.1, WPA worked fine, and there were workarounds for WEP as well. Plus, I’ve never had an issue connecting to the WiFi with *gasp* Windows, or even Linux. So clearly whatever suckiness Fortinet offers it seems that it’s still within Apples abilities to make this work (and nothing frustrates me more then updates taking hugh leaps backwards. Experimental interface whims I can live with (though I’ll be there to bitch about ‘em), but breaking essential computing functions is just plain unforgivable… especially when everyone else seems to get it right). I mean seriously how am I suppose to convince the powers that be that we should all switch to Macs, when they come back (rightfully I might add) and say “WTF, they can’t even connect to our WiFi network.”
My hope is that there are just enough of people with this issue so that Apple will take notice and release a patch very quickly to correct this.