A while ago I mentioned Freedom, the application to stop your network connections so you can get on with more work done. Well, I have been doing a lot of digging and found the Terminal command that does the entire step for you. Its obviously more manual but it gives you an insight into how ifconfig, the tool used, works.
Networks can be complicated and for anyone that isn’t a computer geek may find the Network Preference Pane a bit complicated. Although there is an assistant this post is designed to give people who are less confident with playing with preferences a bit better of an idea of what everything means. It may also help you figure out solutions to when things go wrong. The preference pane shown below is the Leopard version. The Tiger and earlier versions differ slightly but they are essentially the same.
For any one that has a wireless network and has the menu bar item, you will no that the items on the drop down list are a bit limited. For example you can’t see signal strength or any other factors, if you have a choice of wireless networks this could be a problem. As a result you could install a piece of software to do this for you. There is a work around for this.
Network work security is getting more and more important for the security of any computer. Did you know that many applications dial home. Most of the time these isn’t a problem but you may want to keep an eye on what is happening. The solution to this is to monitor your internet connections using Little Snitch.
