Belkin Routers and Snow Leopard
UPDATE: You have to find your DNS settings from the Belkin router and manually put them into the settings on your MacBook airport advanced settings. See here for more. http://kl.am/snowbelkin
A few weeks ago, I noticed that I wasn’t able to fully access some sites from home. Mainly MailChimp and Twitter. I could get to them, but I couldn’t fully load them. Oddly enough, when connected to other networks, things loaded just fine. So I turned to my ISP, AT&T DSL for help.I have been a huge advocate of them for years. As a power user, I have never had an issue with the speed or connection for years. Until now. And with them being the front runners in the opposition to Net Neutrality, I began to wonder of they were restricting the sites?
My call to AT&T was of no help. I was transferred to another country to be told that they could help by diagnosing my router, and it would be $30 for every 30 minutes. I was not paying for them to look at my router. I had tested another connection, so that couldn’t be it. (Just wait.)
A blessed AT&T employee, Johnathon Franklin, reached out to me on Twitter when I was at my last straw. I was debating about changing to Time Warner Cable (who I really dislike) because the issue was affecting my work. He spent a good amount of time with me on the phone and we figured it out.
It wasn’t AT&T DSL. It wasn’t one issue actually. It was a combination of two. I had recently updated to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). It apparently has an issue with Belkin routers (and only Belkin from what I can find). Changing my router solved the problem (I had an old D-Link to use). My roommates Mac running Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) worked just fine on the Belkin. Finding this problem was like a circular reference in Excel. Almost impossible to identify. But online forums almost always help.
The issue is that there is no fix just yet (Update, see above: no fix from Belkin or Apple). Belkin isn’t even talking about the issue, and the Apple forums don’t have a solution. Not sure who needs to solve what. Who needs to patch. Who is responsible. My computer works with every other router, and the Belkin works with every other operating system. So could you two get together and fix this please? For now, I will be purchasing yet ANOTHER router (my third in the year). I’m not excited about the prospect, but at least I have a solution that doesn’t involve installation of another ISP.
I’ll update if I ever have a solution for this other than changing routers or uninstalling Snow Leopard. Thanks to the AT&T Customer Service team for helping out!
