By David Pogue
Speaking of different ways to get online, Mac OS X offers one of the coolest features
known to Internet-loving mankind: multihoming. That’s the ability to auto-detect which
Internet connections methods are available—and to switch to the fastest one available,
automatically.
This feature is especially ideal for laptops. When you open your Web browser, your laptop
might first check to see if it’s at the office, plugged into a cable modem via Ethernet—the
fastest possible connection. If not, it automatically looks for an AirPort network. Finally,
if it draws a blank there, the laptop reluctantly dials the modem. It may not be the fastest
Internet connection, but it’s all you’ve got at the moment.
In short, for each location you create, you can specify which network connections the Mac
should look for, and in which order. You can even turn off some connections entirely; for
example, if you have a desktop Mac that’s always connected to a cable modem, you may never
want your Mac to dial using its built-in modem. In that case, you could turn off the modem entirely.
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Figure 18-6: The key to multihoming is sliding the network connection methods’ names up
or down (and turning off the ones you don’t intend to use in this location). You can also
rename the different configurations just by double-clicking them. |
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Here’s how to go about using this multihoming feature:
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Open System Preferences. Click the Network icon.
Make sure the appropriate location is selected in the Location pop-up menu.
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From the Show pop-up menu, choose Active Network Ports.
Now you see the display shown in Figure 18-6. It lists all the different ways your
Mac knows how to go online, or onto an office network.
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| 3. |
Drag the items up and down in the list into priority order.
If you have a cable modem, DSL, or office network connection, for example, you
might want to drag Built-in Ethernet to the top of the list, because that’s
almost always the fastest way to get online.
At this point, you can also turn off any connections you don’t want your Mac to
use when it’s in this location—the internal modem, for example.
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| 4. |
Click Apply Now. |
That’s all there is to it. Your Mac will actually switch connections—not just each time you go online,
but even in real time, during a single Internet session. If lightning takes out your cable modem in the
middle of your Web surfing, your Mac will seamlessly switch to your AirPort network—or, if necessary,
dial using the modem—to keep your session alive.
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We’ve excerpted “Multihoming”—with the permission of the author
and O’Reilly & Associates—from David Pogue’s new book, “Mac OS X: The Missing
Manual.”
Available from the Apple Store, Amazon, O’Reilly & Associates and other
fine vendors of technology books and products, “Mac OS X: The Missing Manual”
offers readers a thorough and highly enjoyable introduction to Mac OS X. On the O'Reilly site, you can scan the
table of contents, read a sample chapter, and get a full description of the content Pogue covers in the book.
David Pogue is a long-time Macintosh enthusiast, user group proponent,
technology columnist for the New York Times, a well respected author of over twenty books,
and an accomplished prestidigitator—conjuring manuals at will.
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