Making "The Toobs" connection in an orderly fashion...
This might come as a shock to some folks but some of us don't know as much about our computers as we would like to and when some obvious question that no one nas ever asked before comes up and you figure it out, it's always nice to share with others what you discovered. Some people reading this post might be saying "well, duh!" when they've finished reading it but some folks will appreciate what I'm about to enlighten them about.
First of all, if you're not a Mac OS X user, this post won't interest you. Move on to the next one, unless you have some geeky, maudlin curiosity about how the other [and in my opinion better] 10 percent of computer users lives and breathes. Or, maybe you just want to ask the same question about the PC to find the answer and decide once again that your choice of computer is still better than the Mac, despite what you've heard from your programming friends. By all means, go ahead. Be a PC user. I don't care. If you wanna use a craptacular OS, good right ahead and be my guest. And please don't leave me any comments about Mac vs. PC because I just don't care. Get a job at Microsoft and suck on Bill's tit all the way up to Redmond if you want.
Now that we've gotten rid of the PC punters, has anyone ever wondered if there is any logic to the order that your computer connects to a given network like say, the Internet?
Someone came by my cube at work the other day and asked me if there was any rhyme or reason to the order that Macs connect to a given network, more specifically in most cases meaning the Internet, or as one of our glorious politicians likes to describe it, "the Series of Toobs" or "The Toobs" for short; Don't put a big truck on "The Toobs" either; Senator Ted Stevens says the truck might get stuck on the Toobs.
While I was trying to figure out the cryptic art of file sharing last night I stumbled on a feature that I hadn't noticed in the Network System Preference Panel that answers this very question of what order the OS uses to connect to the Internet given multiple available interfaces.
Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences: Click Network and select the Network Port Configurations item from the Show pop-up [PC users: drop down; why is the PC terminology so negative?] that appears below the Location pop-up on the Network preference panel.
On this page, you can check and uncheck Port Configurations that you want or don't want active [Built-In FireWire for Networking? I guess that's a possibility but not for me and Blue-tooth would be a last resort connection option; dow to the bottom for Bluetooth]. I disabled Built-In FireWire by clicking its checkbox to uncheck it.
After enabling what you want to use to connect to the Toobs via a "Network" dragging the items in the list up or down determines the order used for each interface to connect to the network. Logically, if I have an Ethernet cable connected to my computer, I want to use that pipe over my Airport connection because Ethernet is much faster and AirPort or 802.11g/b/a/n is much slower.
So... Built-In Ethernet to the top. AirPort second even though that's the one I'll be using most often at the house followed by Bluetooth and finally Internal Modem for when I go back in tech time to beautiful Prescott Arizona to visit mom and have to slide down the 56K toob known as dial-up. Yuch.
So, if anyone ever asks if there's any logic used to determine which port or interface to use to connect to the Internet or a *network* I can answer that question for a Mac user. I have no idea how this all sorts out on Windows Vista or in XP though. I'm sure someone has already posted this note for PC users somewhere.
