Wednesday, October 01, 2014

If you can't access Starbucks WiFi or Greyhound Bus WiFi after upgrading to OSX 10.9.5 (Maverick's). Here's the fix.

After reinstalling OSX 10.9.5 Maverick's on my new SSD drive. Doing a fresh install (not upgrading) I then couldn't access WiFi at starbucks or on a Greyhound Bus.

On my Macbook the solution seemed to solved for Starbucks WiFi by removing any info in the Proxies section of my Network Preferences (I have yet to verify the Greyhound bus config but I suspect it was the exact same problem). I spoke to the Starbuck Support at "Allstream Customer Service at 1-866-385-2555." They said they'd pass this on to their other support tech's to verify this solution with other users. But in the meantime I'll post the solution I came up with here.

To fix the problem do this:

  1. Open Network Preferences: 
  2. Click on active connections "Advanced" settings:
  3. Go to the "Proxies" section and uncheck all checkboxes under the "Select a protocol to configure" and remove any "Bypass Proxy Settings from these hosts & domains" on my Macbook there was two entries for "*.local, 169.254/16" as soon as I removed these I was able to connect to the "Starbucks WiFi" hotspot and the Starbuck Registration screen came up as normal and I was able to connect to the network successfully!