Switching Locations

If you travel with a laptop, you know the drill. You’re constantly opening up System Preferences→Network so you can switch between Internet settings: Ethernet at the office, WiFi at home. Or maybe you simply visit the branch office from time to time, and you’re getting tired of having to change the local access number for your ISP each time you leave home (and return home again).

The simple solution is the →Location submenu, which appears once you’ve set up more than one Location. As Figure 17-6 illustrates, all you have to do is tell it where you are. OS X handles the details of switching Internet connections.

Creating a New Location

To create a Location, which is nothing more than a set of memorized settings, open System Preferences, click Network, and then choose Edit Locations from the Location pop-up menu. Continue as shown in Figure 17-6 at bottom.

Tip

You can use the commands in the menu to rename or duplicate a Location.

When you click Done, you return to the Network panel. Take this opportunity to set up the kind of Internet connection you use at the corresponding location, just as described on the first pages of this chapter.

If you travel regularly, you can build a list of Locations, each of which “knows” the way you like to get online in each city you visit. ...

Get OS X Mavericks: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.