Laptop Connectivity Problems

A problem that I encounter almost daily on my 2013 MacBook Pro is a connectivity issue. Whether I'm connected wirelessly or wired via an Ethernet cable from a repeater, I lose the connection and am repeatedly prompted for the password to the WiFi network if I'm connected wirelessly. After a short while the problem goes away and all is well. The problem is annoying but doesn't seriously trouble me.

Nonetheless, I'd like to get to the bottom of it and there are plenty of requests on Internet forums from Linux Mint users for solutions to exactly this problem. The fact that it doesn't make any difference whether I'm connected via WiFi or cable rules out the WiFi hardware driver as the problem. Neither does it matter whether I'm connected to the WiFi repeater or the WiFi router.

The Internet router that I'm using is an ancient one and only operates on the 2.4 Ghz frequency with no support for 5 Ghz or any other frequencies! I don't use Bluetooth on this laptop so I've just now turned it off and I'll see if that makes any difference. It shouldn't but who knows. It's worth a try. Overall, I should be happy that things are working as well as they are given the antiquity of the technology that I'm using.

The operating system that I'm using is Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon with the Cinnamon version being 5.2.7. This means that the system is up-to-date. My WiFi adapter is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

I'd like to say that things worked flawlessly when I had Mac OS X installed on this laptop but that wasn't the case. Right from the beginning I had IP conflict alerts whenever connected to a repeater. I first encountered the issue when I stayed at a hotel in Singapore that was clearly using a repeater. In my own bedroom, where the WiFi signal was weak, I encountered the same problem when I installed a repeater. I solved the problem by connecting an Ethernet cable from the repeater to my laptop.

USB Tethering: Mac and Android

I long ago discovered that my Macbook Pro doesn't play well with repeaters. It will connect without problem to the main router but, if it needs to connect via a repeater, then IP address conflicts arise and connectivity is lost. This was the problem in my bedroom but I overcame it by making use of the Ethernet port on my repeater. Once I connected the laptop to the repeater via an Ethernet cable, there was no problem. 

Recently however, my granddaughter was having buffering problems when watching Netflix over WiFi on her iPad Pro. I gave the repeater to her, connected her to an Ethernet cable via a hub and all was well. For her, that is, not for me. I was very quickly confronted with my old problem again. However, I had my Android phone and thought that the solution would be to tether the laptop to my phone via Bluetooth. The Macbook was having none of that. No problem I thought. I have a USB cable so I'll tether via that. No luck.

A little investigation led me to a site run by Joshua White and an app called HoRNDIS-9.2.pkg (46919 bytes) that I downloaded to my laptop and installed. I restarted my laptop and connected to my phone via USB and I'm typing happily away creating this post. 

No help of course from Apple popped up at the top of the search results but at least I'm connected now. I haven't tried watching Netflix or similar yet, in order to test the speed of the connection. I'll do that later and add to this post if there any problems. On his website, Joshua explains the technicalities of how the app works.

I still don't know why the bluetooth tethering didn't work. Perhaps there's a similar program that needs to be downloaded for that to work as well. For the moment, I'm just happy that I'm connected. Perhaps the motto of all this is indeed that CABLE IS STABLE.