VodkaPundit is Back on the Air

My AirPort Extreme got the hiccups this morning. It’s a couple years old, and wifi routers seem to have a limited lifespan — but two years? At Apple’s prices? Sorry, not good enough.

It was the weirdest thing, too. Never saw anything like it. The indicator was green, but there was no wifi network. There wasn’t even any connection for my desktop machine which is hardwired into the AirPort. Pulling up the AirPort Utility app showed the base station, but it wouldn’t let me do anything.

So I pulled the power cord, counted slowly to 30, plugged it back in and — voila! — a wifi network.

For nearly a minute and a half.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I really didn’t want to make a run down to the Apple Store, and I certainly didn’t want to wait until they open at 10. Especially since Melissa is working from home today, too, and really needs some internet going on.

So I pulled up AirPort Utility again, power cycled again, and in my 90-second window of workingness, told the Utility to reset the router. That took two or three minutes. It took another minute, if that, to type my old network name and password in.

And — voila! — a wifi network that works just fine.

A couple weeks ago my mother-in-law bought a similarly-specced Netgear router for dirt cheap. It took five hours to get it up and running properly, and the guest network keeps disappearing.

I’ll pay Apple’s prices.