Home wi-fi Airport Extreme excluding one computer

Can a particular computer be excluded from a home wi-fi network Airport Extreme?
We just got a new router and I suspect a hostile person is excluding my computer from the network. Is this possible? How can I detect and how can I overcome it?

Yes, it can. MAC address filtering, which is normally turned off.

By checking the "Enable Access Control" box, devices can be denied access to the network.


I don't know how to do it, but I assume that spoofing your MAC address would allow you to detect whether your computer is being blocked. It's no good changing the name of the computer, because although the person may have blocked your computer's name, the router will likely discover the MAC address from the name and block the address.

You could get hold of another computer and see if it will join the network from your location. That would at least give you an indication as to what is going on. You may just be in a dead spot.

And you could also just ask whoever is in charge of the router.

Do you control the router or does someone else? You will need the "Network" administrator to help sort it out.

Tell us all the things connected to the network and we can try to help you get access to the network. We need the modern or modem/router, the "new" router, and what access privledges you are having issues with.

Thanks to ferrarr and KevinJS for your suggestions. Some of it was Geek to me, of course, but I thought you'd like to know what we did. My tech guy brought his Mac and determined that the wi fi server had indeed been fiddled with after he set it up, and it did look like I was blocked. So, rather than belabor the point, we just stuck a paper clip in the Airport Extreme and set it up again with new name and passwords.

dcdarling said:

Thanks to ferrarr and KevinJS for your suggestions. Some of it was Geek to me, of course, but I thought you'd like to know what we did. My tech guy brought his Mac and determined that the wi fi server had indeed been fiddled with after he set it up, and it did look like I was blocked. So, rather than belabor the point, we just stuck a paper clip in the Airport Extreme and set it up again with new name and passwords.

Click to expand...

AWESOME! For some reason, I find that really funny. Great solution. Thanks for letting us know.

My tech guy brought his Mac and determined that the wi fi server had indeed been fiddled with after he set it up, and it did look like I was blocked. So, rather than belabor the point, we just stuck a paper clip in the Airport Extreme and set it up again with new name and passwords.

Click to expand...

Nice fix and too bad you couldn't have used paper clip or something much larger on whoever hacked your network in the first place.

Glad to hear that fix worked well for you.