Airport Congestion
After sixty days of uptime, I rebooted my mac recently to do some updates. I noticed when it came back up that it connected to an open network in the building rather than to my network. I looked in System Preferences, and my Network location was very confused about how I was connected; it said I was using “PCI Ethernet Slot 2″ instead of my Airport card, but I think I would have noticed an ethernet cable hanging out of my mac.
So I went into the Network Port Configurations and turned off everything but Airport and the internal modem—not that I’ll be going back to dialup anytime soon. That shocked the system into admitting it was connected with Airport. However, this made the original problem worse: now every time I put the mac to sleep it reconnected to the weaker open network rather than my network.
When in doubt, google. I found this macosxhints thread which recommended deleting all preferred networks and starting over. So I did, sad though I was to see Yersina, Veronica’s wireless network, go. Now the airport connects to my network, although it could just mean that the open network has faded out completely…