Dropping network connections can be incredibly frustrating. And finding the source can be a challenge. Over the years, I’ve found a number of troubleshooting methods, but the intermittent drop can be the worse to troubleshoot around. When this happens, I’ve occasionally resorted to scripting around failures, and dumping information into a log file to find the issue. For example, you may find that when a network connection fails, you have a very strong signal somewhere, or that you have a very weak signal on all networks. I’ve found there are three pretty simple commands to test joining/unjoining, and using networks (beyond the standard pings or port scans on hosts). The…
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Extended Wireless Information in OS X
Hold down the Option key when you click on the AirPort icon in the menu bar: You can then see the SSID, channel, security, RSSI, transmit rate, etc. The airport command is now located at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport so this would be similar to: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -I
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Airport becomes Wi-Fi in Lion
If you run networksetup and do a -listallhardwareports in OS X Snow Leopard, you’ll see that the Hardware Port: for en0 (on an MBA at least, but you should get the point even if it’s a MacPro) is AirPort. If you run the same command in Lion, you’ll notice the the hardware port is now Wi-Fi. This change cascades to any commands like -listpreferredwirelessnetworks where the hardware port might get called on. For most of my scripts for assigning AirPort networks, etc I was able to mostly just find-and-replace AirPort for Wi-Fi, provided I didn’t use AirPort anywhere else (e.g.$AirPort, etc).
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Pushing Wireless Networks Out
If you need to push a wireless network into your image in Mac OS X, you can do so with the networksetup command. Networksetup has a few options that are specifically geared to working with wireless networks. In order to obtain a list of all of the networks that your system has used, you will use the networksetup command along with the -listpreferredwirelessnetworks option. The man page lists that you will follow this command with the hardwareport. The hardwareport is the name of the wireless network adapter, which can be seen in the System Preference pane. By default this is called AirPort, so the default command to see all wireless…
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Managing Airport Settings from the Command Line
From time to time we will end up writing shell scripts that do a number of tasks with airport interfaces in Mac OS X, including automatically detecting networks and disabling the card based on TCP/IP settings/location, querying signal strength for positioning of WAPs and joining specific wireless networks. As such, a couple of commands keep coming up, since the airport card in a Mac can be controlled in a number of ways from the command line. First and foremost – it can be enabled and disabled using the networksetup command, located in /usr/sbin. The option to use with the command is -setairportpower which is boolean as on or off. So to…
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On The Road: Ways to Avoid Flight Delays
Let’s face it: all the airlines suck now. When my grandfather was with the airlines things were different (I think). But, the worst thing that an airline can do isn’t to carve out an inch of your space every year (some day we’ll be rack mounted in the plane – are you a 1U, 2U or 4U box?). The worst thing they do is being late. Which in turn makes us late for jobs, or more painful to the ‘ole heartstrings late to get home to the family. Not that airline execs have heartstrings – look at how they treat their own unionized employees… Anyway, some of my own tips…
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Airport Express Warning Lights
Find their meaning below: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2610
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Wireless Networking 101
I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Wireless networks use high frequency radio signals to connect computers to each other and to shared-resources for the transmission of data such as files, images or connection to the internet. This type of network is known as a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). Wireless networks offer most of the same ability as a traditional wired LAN. If your wired network has the ability to access the Internet today, then your wireless LAN will be able to as well. A wireless LAN typically consists of two components; a wireless network card and an access point. The access point serves as an aggregate point for all…