Airport self-assigned IP address?

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Hello

Yesterday my Macbook (intel core 2 duo model) started refusing wifi connections, with various symptoms appearing along the course of my troubleshooting.
There have been no recent software updates, installs or activities that can explain it. Likewise, the routers I have tested are working absolutely fine for all my wifi enabled devices except the Macbook (I have 2 networks, different routers, ISPs, SSIDs - PC's/iphone/ipad/blackberry are connecting fine)

Initially I will get the message:
"Airport does not have an IP address and cannot connect to the internet"
This is usually followed by:
"Airport has the self-assigned IP address 169.xx.xx.xx and will not be able to connect to the internet"
Also, the airport icon bars alternate between 2 & 3 bars frequently, regardless if I am literally 2 feet from the router..

I have spent a few hours following tips on other blogs & forums, and tried the following (most including a reboot):

- Disabling the airport config & preferred networks
- Deleting /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences
- WiFi router power-cycle, channel changing, WEP/WPA & disabling encryption, assigning static IP etc
- Rebooting
- Disabling/enabling the Firewall etc.
- Deleting keychains
- Confirming no proxy is set..
- Resetting the system management controller
- Resetting NVRAM

On the (rare) occasion when it appears to assign an address, there is an anomaly - using the Network Utility I've noticed packets are sent & received by the router(s) and I can ping & traceroute external URLs/IP addresses! Yet, it still will not allow connections via any other means (safari, email etc).

Anybody seen this before? I normally ask for help as a last resort as there's usually someone out there with an answer, but heaven knows I've looked...

Many thanks
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Way... way too many specs to list.
I've had this happen on multiple machines. Generally either deleting the prefs or rebooting the access point have resolved the problem.
 
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I've had this happen on multiple machines. Generally either deleting the prefs or rebooting the access point have resolved the problem.

To be honest, those were among the first things I tried, but this issue is affecting any wifi connection I'm trying regardless of router make or model.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
09 MBP 8GB ram 500GB HD OS 10.9 32B iPad 4 32GB iPhone 5 iOs7 2TB TC Apple TV3
169. is a default no connection for just about everything that cannot obtain a working ip have you tried configuring IPv4 using DHCP then click renew lease.
 
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I have renewed the DHCP on the client and router sides, it doesn't help though.
Another suggestion a helpful forum member recommended was to use the airport command line tools to check the signal strength. The signal is good, but restarting airport via command did not solve this, although I have noticed that the connection is slightly more stable now, assigning the IP ok, but still no internet access.

Like before, I have a situation where I can ping and traceroute internet hostnames (Google etc) but safari, ff, email, vpn, ftp clients are not connecting. It is almost like there is something uniquely faulty with http. Wireshark shows http responses from the target websites are being received, but the client is having to send repeated tcp retransmissions before the connection is reset when the client timesout. I can't pretend to be knowledgable enough on the topic of network diagnostics to make any solid conclusions here..

Please keep up the suggestions though - they are most appreciated!
 

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