OS X wake from sleep network problems

At Slow Firefox DNS Mac OS X Leopard I had written about a strange DNS issue with OS X and Firefox. That's gone away, but for some time now I've had a new problem: when I wake from sleep, it takes a long time before I can do any network access. Firefox and Safari just hang with spinning beach balls, ssh times out.. it looks like networking is dead.

It isn't dead though: I often leave an ssh session to other machines connected when I sleep briefly. Those sessions remail connected without problem. I just can't start new sessions.

Maddeningly, the problem would sometimes disappear entirely, only to reappear a day or so later. I thought that an Apple update or Firefox upgrade had fixed it.. but no, it came back again.

I thought it might be a DNS issue again, so I tried with hard IP addresses. No, those don't work either.

I've found plenty of similar complaints on the Net, but for wireless activity. This is happening to me with a hard Ethernet cable - I have Airport shut off most of the time. But.. Airport did give me a clue.

I noticed that when I happened to be using Airport, whether here or elsewhere, I wouldn't get the sleep problem. As I said, I usually have Airport shut off. I don't know why - I just don't like anything running if I'm not using it. So I usually have it shut off.

So what's happening here? Is OS X trying to use Airport even though I have it shut off? Maybe.. though here's another clue: If I turn Airport on and then shut it off, the hanging after sleep goes away for a while. That probably explains the supposedly random nature of this - I had probably turned on Airport for some reason. Maybe OS X just gets confused and thinks Airport is on unless it has been turned off recently?

I don't know. The obvious fix is to just leave Airport on. I suppose that's what I'll do.