Blast from the past

Okay so dig into your memory banks and put on your thinken caps.

So i have an old sawtooth g4 400 desktop that i have recently dug out of my back room since my main windows machine bit the dust. I'm buying a new one but it will be a few weeks before I get it. Now, the sawtooth was my fathers machine way back when and I inherited it a while back. I know he connected using airport but for various reasons I use hard line Ethernet. Now the sawtooth runs 10.2.8 and of course I don't have any of the relevant system disks.

So.

After the windows machine died i figured i could use the old mac to check email and other basic internet tasks until the new comp arrived. I connect it, boot it, everything looks good. I open safari and .. no server connection. I look at the internet control and everything seems fine using DHCP and all that on the built in Ethernet. I ping various servers, traceroute, no problems. Run safari... nothing. I dig out my old Toughbook, connect to the network, no problems. I do some research. It seems that this is a known problem with 10.2.8 and this particular mac and find a solution on the apple site. I dump it into my flash drive, transfer it to the mac, run it. reboot. boot safari... no server.

So I'm sort of at a loss here. The update i downloaded and installed was supposed to fix this (build is the latest 675 maybe? I'm at a friends house) the thing i got was an update for Ethernet and some battery monitor. I assume this is the right one. I guess, from reading, that the problem lies in the appleGMACEthernet.kext file that is now v1.3.0 instead of the old v1.2.4. Now, the solution is, download the fix(which didn't work or I don't know which one to get) or manually replace the new kext file with the old(which i don't have since the disks are lost to time and distance and this is such an old problem that all the links to the file in question don't exist anymore) So I am the proverbial impasse. I have two weeks or more before the new computer comes in. I know dad never ran into this problem as he used the airport to connect and I don't have that option. The toughbook is even more of a dinosaur than the mac and I really don't like connecting it to the internet anyway (I am hellishly paranoid about the data on it, for basically no reason but hey when you live by yourself you get quirky after a while.) I want to use the mac for internet in the interim but such a thing seems out of the question at the moment. The frustrating thing is that the ping and traceroute work fine, so i know the internal card isn't broken. If i wait for half an hour or more the connection works okay for one page (i.e. it took 45 minutes to load the google main page but it did appear to load.) I can rework the cable modem so that it connects from usb, but of course i cant find the relevant software for that either. I really don't know what else to do at this point. I really don't want to use the toughbook and even if i do it's so old that it hardly works in any case.

So... am I just hosed or is there something I am not seeing? I would really appreciate any help anyone could give.

try Firefox

you could try firefox and see if you can connect.

To test firefox, you will need to run version 2 on Puma (OSX 10.2)

Old Version of Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.20 for Mac Download - OldApps.com

If you think that the .kext will fix it, then here's my copy of it, straight from Panther 10.2.8 on a Sawtooth 450.

After you replace the old file, you MUST remove the file Extensions.mkext, which will force Mac OS X to rebuild its extensions cache on the next reboot. Also, repair permissions right after copying the file or it'll never work.

View attachment AppleGMACEthernet.kext.zip