Network Central and Multihoming
In this chapter, you’ll be spending a lot of time in the Network
pane of System Preferences (Figure 10-1). (Choose
→System Preferences; click Network.) This list
summarizes the ways your Mac can connect to the Internet or an office
network—Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular modem card, VPN, and so
on.
Multihoming
The order of the network connections listed in the Network pane is important. That’s the sequence the Mac uses as it tries to get online. If one of your programs needs Internet access and the first method isn’t hooked up, then the Mac switches to the next available connection automatically.
Figure 10-1. You set up all your network connections here, and you can connect to and disconnect from all your networks here. The listed network connections are tagged with color-coded dots. A green dot means turned on and connected to a network; yellow means the connection is working but some other setting is wrong (for example, your Mac can’t get an IP address); red means there’s no connection, or you haven’t yet set up a connection.
In fact, Mac OS X can maintain multiple simultaneous network connections—Ethernet, WiFi, dial-up, even FireWire—with a feature known as multihoming.
This feature is especially relevant for laptops. When you open your Web browser, ...
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