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I had the same thing happen to me for a long, long time on my MacBook. It didn’t even have to go to sleep for it to happen. It all disappeared when I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard. I don’t know if it was the fresh OS that fixed it or just a bug with between the MacBook and Leopard. Either way, the problem is gone.

Interesting. We’re at Snow Leopard…maybe Lion will fix the problem. Ya just gotta love the interactions between software and hardware…

For my purposes (*) Photobucket looks really good. One thing that bothers me is that one of the primary owners is News Corp/Fox…they are well known for their integrity (oh wait). I guess for now, I’ll stick with DreamHost. They’re a web hosting service so they’re not actually in the ‘file backup’ business but they offer a 50 gb backup account that, if you exceed the max they just bill you a few cents per gig. Plus, you now own a domain.

(*) – We have tons of photos. Any photo is stored on at least one computer and backed up to a network drive. The network drive is actually a twin drive setup using an NSLUG with mirrored drives so in order to lose any image, three drives need to fail. We then ftp the images to DreamHost. While DH doesn’t backup my backup account, I now have an off site redoubt for our images. Photobucket offers ftp and unlimited storage for a bit less than I’m paying now for DH so it would be an excellent alternative if I could just get over my aversion to News Corp and Fox ownership.

It happened again.
I could still hit resources on my internal network.
The Mac had two user session’s going; one for the primary user and one for me.
My session had Firefox up, the primary did not.
The system was active in the primary account.
Web connectivity was killed in both sessions.
Forcing a reconnect to the router didn’t help.

I’ve been playing a bit. If I run two sessions and don’t leave FF up, then I’m not seeing (at least yet) any drop of web connectivity.

That’s it. The most recent lockup happened a couple of days ago so I don’t have enough run time to be assured that leaving FF down makes the problem go away.

Doug, have you ever visited our iNet Interactive sister site, Mac Forums?

There are a bunch of very knowledgeable Mac guys over there. Check them out!

I have not but it’s now bookmarked. Thank you so very much.

First: thank you for the detailed troubleshooting guide; well done!
Second: see answers below

Do you have any other computers on your wireless router, and are they having any difficulty staying connected?
3 other wireless devices. 2 Win, 1 Mac. The Win boxes are fine. I’m not hearing complaints about the Mac laptop.

Is this a recent issue, or is it relatively new? Has anything been changed in your wireless hardware or software setup just before the problem began?
Not recent. I actually don’t use the Mac all that much but it seems that about once out of every 10 uses, the system has gone to sleep and the web connection is just gone.

Have you tried using Ethernet to see if the problem goes away? If the Ethernet works, you may have a router hardware problem with wireless, or a problem with your Mac wireless card.
I don’t have a wire close to this box so I can’t test it. I’m thinking about pulling wire just to get more speed on the connection but haven’t done that yet.

Are you able to connect with your other computers on your home network from your iMac even when your Mac cannot connect to the Internet? Try pinging “www.amazon.com” without the quote marks to see what results you obtain. Then try pinging Amazon.com’s IP address 72.21.214.128 to see if you get replies to your ping. Use the Network Utility tool to ping.
Don’t know. Next time I’ll poke around the network and see what I can see.

Do you have a dual band Wireless N router? If so, use the 5 Ghz frequency. It is subject to less outside interference than is the 2.4 Ghz band, but has a shorter range. A number of devices in a home also use the 2.4 Ghz band.
N but not dual band.

Do you live in an apartment complex or in close proximity to other houses that may be using wifi? Intermittent wireless problems can be caused by too many signals on the same band width and/or on the same wireless channel.
We live out in the middle of nowhere. I’ve never detected any other wifi points. The nearest house is about 200′ away through the woods.

MakeUseOf.com has an article on wifi scanners for the Mac that includes links to download two free apps. One of these will help you locate all the wifi signals in your vicinity, and give you the channels on which they operate. The recommended channels are 1, 6, and 11. If your router is set to one of these channels, and many others in your area are as well, this could be the problem. Change your channel to see if the problem goes away.

I am not that familiar with all the settings available on the Mac, but is there a setting in System Preferences that will allow your wireless card to be powered down when your Mac goes to sleep? If so, disable that setting to see if that helps. It may be in Energy Saver or Network.
Nothing in any of the settings that deals with the wifi card. The system is set to sleep in about 15 minutes but not to drop the network connection.

Also, if Internet connecting is a problem for any of your other computers, you might get your cable or DSL provider to check on their end for problems that may be contributing to the issue.

Thanks again. Next time I go off line, I’ll ping around and see what happens.
I’ve tried renewing the dhcp lease – no joy.

Highly intermittent problems are just the best!

Thanks again.

Doug

Couple of thoughts. Windows Media Encoder allows you to do screen caps of videos. It’s from MS and is free.
More importantly, you should make certain that recording the webinar is allowed. Most commercial webinars are copyright protected and recording isn’t allowed.

If you have a child who is sufficiently motivated to find ways around your security settings, they will find ways around your security settings.
Talk to your kids, figure out what they’re doing, and help them understand how to be smart on-line. Teach them some life skills other than ‘NO’.

On the technical side, nobody has yet mentioned using bootable linux disks; great way to bypass pretty much anything you set up.

It is possible to lock PCs down and have total control over who gets to do what. Our work PCs are pretty close to military grade secure. Unfortunately (or fortunately) this level of security requires third party tools that are non-trivial to set up and maintain AND they require some level of active monitoring so you can see when/where breech attempts occur. They include controls that begin at the bios and go out to the web interface. Unless you are running a mil-grade network, you’re probably not going here.

It’s mentioned that you need to get the “paid version” of PDFCreator to encrypt files. Are we talking about the same program? It is free – it’s open source … I set my preferences to encrypt the files, so I am automatically given the option to set a password for the PDF as soon as I hit print to PDFCreator as I work with medical records. I just hit cancel instead of setting the password if I don’t need to encrypt the document. It’s the best open source PDF utility available, IMO.
🙂

She’s definitely talking about Foxit’s PDF Creator, different product.

PDFCreator (no space) has tons of options and can generate all kinds of different formatted outputs, uses different levels of encryption, password or no passwords, can combine multiple docs into a single PDF, and just works like a charm. If you haven’t been into the ‘options’ section in a while, it’s worth a look

I started using Sumatra some time back and like it quite a bit.

For software, I really like the SyncBack products from 2BrightSparks http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html I’m using and am very happy with the free version. You can point to anything Windows can mount, do incremental backups, full backups, specify directors, files, etc.

I have a NSLU2 with two 1T drives; drive 2 mirrors drive 1, all files go onto drive 1.
I also push files to a remote server. I have a DreamHost web account which comes with a 50G ‘backup’ user account, anything over 50G is a nominal fee and the monthly on the web service is pretty cheap too so even if I’m not running a web site, the backup account is as cheap as anything else out there (or was when I started this process a couple of years back). The nice thing about DH’s backup is that it’s just file space and I decide what goes in. Most backup services require that you run their software on your machine and it keeps files on your PC in sync with the backup server. Once you remove a file from your PC, it’s yanked from the backup server too…if I want to pull a bunch of stuff off my main PC, I want to leave it at the backup site until I’m ready to delete it.

I can’t recommend any hardware; I’ve used lots of different drives and everything has worked well.

Browsers are not concidered a safe alternative for password protection. A simple Google searchshows many tests of these types of issues. Most “experts” agree to this from everything I’ve read. I have personally not done any testing myself, I rely on others that are far more knowledgable in these matters.

Sorry, still no getting the problem. If you use FF and a good master password, then I don’t see a problem with using it. If you back up the passwords, you don’t have to worry if your pc dies. If you use something like XMarks, you get encrypted off site storage and access to your passwords from any of your PCs. To me this seems way better than trying to remember to bring a usb fob with you everywhere (and keeping more than one drive in sync if you have multiple users of the same set of passwords).

If a bad guy gets access to your hardware, including your password keeper fob, all bets are off.

Java script cross site hacks can be mitigated by using something like NoScript.

So, where’s the problem using the built in keeper?

I’m looking for a free image editing program …
My main uses are cropping, making pics brighter or darker and resizing.

TIA

If you want simple image editing and tweaking, buy a Mac and use iPhoto. . I’m not a Mac fan boy but my wife recently purchased a Mac and I gotta tell ya that iPhoto is way cool. It has an incredibly simple interface and fixes pretty much any blemish you’d like to fix without layers and masks and obscure image editing lingo…point, click, fixed.

Re Gimp and it’s ‘horrid’ UI. Once you leave the simple editing systems, the apps become complex, the number of options increases exponentially, and the interface becomes more and more difficult. If you like/know Photoshop, there is a version of Gimp that mimics the UI (think it’s called photoGimp, not sure but Google is your friend).

Picasa is simple to use and free for most simple image fixing.

There’s an add-in for windows (used to be Power Tools, not sure if it’s available for all versions of Windows) that included a right click on file, resize option – very nice.

An option is Picure Resizer – it’s an exe that you drag files onto and it automagically does the resize for you; change the file name, change the size of the resultant pics. Pretty cool, offers batch file handling..

Best of luck.

I have no idea if this is the problem, but Adobe changes their file format every version or two. Lotus Notes/Domino uses a third party search app that can search not only Notes documents/records for any text string but also any files attached to Notes records. At some point (I think it was Notes/Domino 6.something) IBM gave up guaranteeing that the search would properly index PDF files; each version of Acrobat produces a different formatted pdf file and the search engine had to be updated for each version. I find that pdf files are still searchable within Notes/domino but never know for sure if I’m getting all the hits I should.

If the indexer/search engine for MS has similar problems, it could be related to the version of pdf files on your system. Try looking at the file version and see if the hits and misses fall into any clear groupings.