Getting Airport only connect to Access Points

October 21, 2005 8:53 PM

Is there a way to tell a Powerbook with airport to connect only to Access Points like Windows XP?

In Windows XP, there is an option to tell the computer to connect to Peer to Peer networks only, Access Points only or both. I'm wondering if the same option exists on OS X.

posted by phyrewerx to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Not that I can see.

You can create peer to peer networks.

You can also tell the Mac to connect to specific named networks, so if you can name the peer network, you could limit the Mac to only connecting to that.

However, I don't see any option for only connecting to peers. I don't know the ins and outs of the protocol, but I'm not even sure how the client machine would be able to tell the difference. I guess if you can do it in the Windows world there must be a way, but it seems strange to me.
posted by willnot at 9:23 PM on October 21, 2005

In the Network > Airport section of System Prefs, you've got the options for this sort of thing:



And through Options button...



I reckon the trick you're after is to set that dropdown in the Options window to 'Ask before joining an open network', and just try to ensure that the network your Mac tries to join is an infrastructure node, and not an ad-hoc one.

I know this doesn't clear things up entirely; it's odd that OS X doesn't differentiate between the two.
posted by armoured-ant at 2:29 PM on October 22, 2005

Thanks Ant!

I think the solution that I see now is disable "Automatically add new networks to the preferred networks list" and then have set the "if no networks are found" option to "ask.."

Gonna test this out Monday.
posted by phyrewerx at 2:47 PM on October 22, 2005