Ping a wired Mac to stop Airport dropout

Question

All my wireless Macs at home are experiencing the horrid intermittent Airport dropouts that seem to be caused by a recent Apple update.
I've found that pinging a wired computer on the network magically restores the Airport connection on the wireless ones... for a little while.
The only reliable way I've been able to keep the connection active is:
1. open two terminal windows and in one type ping -i 2 nameofwiredmachine.local. This will ping that computer every two seconds.
2. In the second window type ping -i 3 nameofwiredmachine.local. Wait until a half-second or so after the first window responds with a successful ping before hitting enter.
Between these two windows, you should be able to keep your connection active as long as your Airport card deigns to acknowledge that there is, in fact, a signal being received.
If your Airport card goes into signal denial, then you're stuck waiting until it comes back. Note that one window does not reliably keep your connection active. The dropout will frequently happen in-between pings and stall a single ping process.
Every once in a while, a stall will happen while both ping windows are waiting for a response. In that case, you can focus on one of the ping windows, type ctrl-c, then hit the up key and press enter. That ping process will kick-start the other one.
your pal,
- kevin

Answer 1

Turn on the wireless card in the older Mac if it has one. However, it should not make any difference on a local network. You should be able to communicate even though one is wireless. So, I would look at your Sharing setup.