OS 10.4 autologin for wireless

Published by in apple on October 20th, 2005

This is rather technical and non-standard for my educational technology blog posts here– but I need to record this as much for myself as for others who may find this useful. I am now finding myself referring back to my own blog more frequently now, to remember something or share it again. Scary! :-)

Since upgrading to Macintosh OS 10.4 Tiger, my laptop has no longer automatically reconnected to our university wireless network. We use 802.1X encryption– this upgrade did not affect my ability to reconnect after waking the laptop from sleep on other unencrypted wireless networks, just the encrypted one here at the university. Today thanks to the amazing skills of Danny Mar, we found a solution to this problem. Unfortunately, because it involves having the operating system recreate a read-only file, it requires use of the Terminal. But it DOES work! Here is what we did.

  1. Click on Spotlight, type “terminal,” down arrow to the application and press enter.
  2. Navigate to the root by typing cd /
  3. Change the directory to library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration.
  4. Execute the “sudo” command (superuser-do) to rename the airport preferences plist file something else (I renamed it “temp.plist”: mv com.apple.airport.preferences.plist temp.plist
  5. Reconnect to the wireless network (this rebuilt the preference setting).
  6. Put the computer to sleep.
  7. Wake up from sleep.

The computer should now automatically reconnect to the wireless when waking up from sleep! If it doesn’t reconnect, open Internet Connect, disconnect, and click CONNECT again.

Here is the copied sequence of commands we used in the Terminal to do this. You can see that the command mv (rename) when done without the sudo command first results in a “Permission Denied” error, because that file is “read only” to users. The command “ls” is directory list, equivalent in DOS to “dir”. Another cool Terminal trick Danny taught me was typing part of a directory or file name, and then pressing the tab key to complete it. Pressing up arrow retypes the previous command, and you can left arrow to add something in front of it, like the sudo command.

Last login: Thu Oct 20 14:09:29 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
Shadowfax:~ myusername$ cd /
Shadowfax:/ myusername$ cd library
Shadowfax:/library myusername$ cd Preferences
Shadowfax:/library/Preferences myusername$ cd SystemConfiguration/
Shadowfax:/library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration myusername$ ls
NetworkInterfaces.plist com.apple.nat.plist
com.apple.PowerManagement.plist preferences.plist
com.apple.airport.preferences.plist preferences.plist.system_default
Shadowfax:/library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration myusername$ mv com.apple.airport.preferences.plist temp.plist
mv: rename com.apple.airport.preferences.plist to temp.plist: Permission denied
Shadowfax:/library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration myusername$ sudo mv com.apple.airport.preferences.plist temp.plist
Password:
Shadowfax:/library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration myusername$ ls
NetworkInterfaces.plist preferences.plist
com.apple.PowerManagement.plist preferences.plist.system_default
com.apple.nat.plist temp.plist

On this day..

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