Comments on: Mac DHCP Wireless Connection Broken With Self-Assigned IP Address

By: ivanoats

ivanoats — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:45:00 +0000

The button for logs is not there in Snow Leopard. I had to open the Console app.

By: ivanoats

ivanoats — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:45:00 +0000

The button for logs is not there in Snow Leopard. I had to open the Console app.

By: Joel

Joel — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 18:38:31 +0000

Uggghhhh!! I spent the past week killing myself on how to fix this. 2 minutes after reading your article I realized I had somehow set my firewall to reject any type of network. It’s now working fine. Thanks Greg!!!

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:53:40 +0000

And another thank you from the internet. My Macbook Pro had lost all power long enough to force the time to reset. From that point until reconfiguring the firewall, I’d had no luck getting it online. configd had come up as wanting authorization to access the network, which I’d allowed, but it still couldn’t connect until I killed the pref file.

By: Ross Phillips

Ross Phillips — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:29:31 +0000

I recently got my Logic board replaced and about week later I could no longer do DHCP. Though I put this down to the DHCP release time. A big thanks from me for posting this!

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:40:15 +0000

You have no idea how much this saved me. My computer out of nowhere started rejecting its own IP address from the router, giving me a .169 and I talked to everyone about it, freaking out about how I couldn’t access the internet anymore, but all the rest of my computers worked. I am going on a business trip tomorrow and I need the internet, and god… your post saved me. You explained it so well. Thank you!!! I NEVER would have thought it was the firewall, because it never was a problem before. I never even knew where firewall was located! Thank you thank you thank you, you’re a life saver!

By: Jerome

Jerome — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:12:38 +0000

Thank you – it totally worked! And yes, at some point, I had selected only selected servers for incoming connections but only months later did this problem start happening.

By: Roger Owens

Roger Owens — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:55:23 +0000

Thanks so much for this tip.
I’ve been having this problem ever since resetting the power management chip in my PBG4 under Leopard. Sporadically at different WiFi locations, I get this error. So far the only solution I can find that seems to work every time is to re-boot with the shift key down; this boots into Safe Mode. The problem goes away when I first use Safari in Safe Mode. Then I restart, and it works again for a few days. Very peculiar! The OS asks me a couple questions about allowing access every time I sign on to a new router; if I don’t answer these questions positively and quickly, I will start getting this same “error” message, when I try to to renew my DHCP address, it always fails. So try the Safe Boot. Hope this helps. Apple needs to realize they have a problem here, resetting the router will not fix this problem because the problem is in the Mac OS networking software. No doubt some young programmer hasn’t accounted for the fact that it’s not a perfect world! Will try deleting some of these plist file deletions if I get the problem again.

By: sandeep Gupta

sandeep Gupta — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:18:22 +0000

Same Here… I donot have com.apple.alf.plist file itself. I am on 10.6.2 and the issue only started happening for my work wireless about 5-6 weeks back but works fine on my home wireless network.

Another interesting things is, though sometimes it’s stuck at self-assigned-ip-address, some other times it gets an ip address but still cannot reach the internet.

I went to a cafe today where other folks also had mac. Their internet worked fine where as I got stuck with the same issue I face at my work…

**Valid IP address**** Status on Airpot toggles between Airport:On and Airport: Looking for networks….

By: miguel

miguel — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:53:09 +0000

cannot get this to work either… i never had firewall on and tried all the different plist file deletions… still getting a self-assigned IP. I’m on 10.6.2, computer is pretty much brand new and has worked with many networks as I was traveling but does not work at home.