Choosing a Base Station
Posted November 13th, 2010 @ 11:44am by Erik J. Barzeski
Why, why, why won't Mac OS X let you choose which base station you connect to? The signal strength to my "Upstairs" base station is much stronger than to my "Basement" one, yet my Mac Pro (second floor) insists on connecting to the one with the weaker signal.
At times, my "Transmit Rate" will drop to 8 or even 1 in the AirPort menu.
Things have finally been pretty stable since the problems I had months ago - I'm not even going to link to all of those posts - but this one is a continual issue. Yes, it makes sense when you have a laptop and you move around, but why won't the Mac Pro either let me choose the base station to connect to or choose the one with the consistently stronger signal?
My other laptops will choose it from time to time (when I wake them from sleep while upstairs, most often - sometimes a few feet from the Mac Pro) and only seem to choose "Basement" when they're physically closer to the basement AirPort.
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Posted 15 Nov 2010 at 6:01pm #
Why not have distinct SSID's on each base station? It's not as elegant, but will do exactly what you are asking for.
Posted 15 Nov 2010 at 8:06pm #
Why not just block the MAC address from connecting to the ABS? That way, it can't connect to it...
With a desktop like that, it's unlikely that you'd want it to change frequently, and you could just update your ABS configs if you need to.
Posted 16 Nov 2010 at 10:06am #
[quote comment="63338"]Why not have distinct SSID's on each base station? It's not as elegant, but will do exactly what you are asking for.[/quote]
Because only Basement is connected to the Internet. The main point of "Upstairs" is to extend the network farther.
[quote comment="63340"]Why not just block the MAC address from connecting to the ABS? That way, it can't connect to it...[/quote]
Because ACL blocks access to the entire network, as you and I just discovered. 🙂