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When the new airport extreme came out I was quick to purchase one. I had a couple of reasons for my upgrade; I wanted to be able to take advantage of the new N speeds and wanted to be able to share an external drive with my daughter who is a Windows user. I have my home networked and have an Airport Express tied to my home stereo system. Both of these wireless access points are tied into a Fortigate firewall through a Netgear switch. Prior to purchasing the airport extreme, my iMac was accessing the home network wirelessly. But adding the second base station allowed me to “wire” this computer and access the network via ethernet plugged into the switch in the back of the new airport extreme. I wanted to be able to access the network faster and wanted to be able to use a Wake-on-Lan feature that I still have never gotten to work (but that is another story).
Shortly after rearranging my new network I began getting kernel panics on my iMac. I had never had one before on this machine and was very dismayed at seeing one. For those of you Mac users out there who have never seen one, it is enough to strike the fear in the heart of the most ardent Mac Addict. Though prettier than the blue screen of death on a Windows machine, they still indicate that something is terribly wrong. At first the issue was intermittent, happening maybe once a week. This went on for several weeks until one Saturday morning when I get received 4 of them within an hour, 2 on reboot. The day after that I had 8 of them, 4 on attempting to reboot. Something was wrong! Very wrong! I immediately suspected a hardware problem, which is the usual cause of these issues.
To start my trouble shooting I turned off my airport card. My thinking was that having two paths to the network and two ip addresses was causing a conflict. After another half-dozen kernel panics I figured this was not the issue. I next did a hardware test from the install cd’s provided with my iMac. I ran the test three different times and there were no hardware issues located. I felt for certain that there would be a memory problem with the machine, but none. In my reading on the issue I came across a more complete memory test than the one included with my iMac and so $1.99 later I was running memtest. I felt certain that I would find my problem, buy some new memory, and move on with my life. No such luck. I ran memtest a total of fifteen times over three nights in single user mode and could find no problems. So now what?
I am now a month into my kernel panic issue which is steadily getting worse. I took a deep breath and decided to try and remember what I had done just before the issue started. I had installed no new software. There was no new hardware in the machine. The only change I had made was plugging an ethernet cable into the machine. I decided to unplug the cable and work from the airport card again. “Holy pile of silicone Batman,” the problem went away. I worked for two weeks with no kernel panics. Whew! But you know, I really did want to speed up my connection. I wonder what would happen if I plugged the iMac into a dumb switch instead of my Airport Extreme. Taking an old switch that I had laying around I inserted it into the mix. One week later I have had no kernel panics.
I feel that I have been as fair as possible is assessing this issue and have looked at every possibility to not blame this beautiful new piece of hardware on my network. But, I have to say that I believe that there must be some issue with my Airport Extreme. I have not taken it to the genius bar because, quite frankly, I believe they will tell me I am crazy. Kernel panics are difficult issues to trace and never happen when you need them to. It is sort of like taking your car into the shop because it is making a noise. As soon as you let the mechanic listen, it stops.

I am open to any suggestions and comments from Apple but something is fishy here.

[tags]Mac, OsX, Apple, Kernel Panic, memtest, Aiport Extreme, hardware failure[/tags]