I don’t know what the story is, but sometimes I go to places and my Mac automatically connects to the wireless network, but other times it requires that I select the network. The password to the network is in my “keychain”, but something’s still missing… ?
The issue you’re talking about is related to what Mac OS X calls a preferred network. Depending on how you have things configured, your Mac might well only connect to those networks you’ve specified as preferred. Generally, any network you access succesfully should be on that list, but I have seen that sometimes it doesn’t work. My sneaking suspicion is that it’s something to do with 802.11b versus 802.11g networks, but I have no actual data to prove my case. 🙂
Let me show you how to specify that a given network is a preferred wireless network, however, and you can go from there…
Start out with
Apple –> System Preferences… and choose Network. Most likely, it’ll look like this:
If you have something else, no worries. What you want to do is specify Automatic for Location and Airport for Show. Now it’ll look like this:
You can see that I have “By default, join Preferred networks “, the other choice is “automatic”, but given your description, I’m betting yours is set similarly.
Below that is a list of preferred networks, including Aerie, AngelNet, Steve Hardesty, Angelnet and quite a few more. Frankly, you can see where I use my laptop based on the names of the networks I have on this list!
To change a preferred network connection, select it and click “Edit”, and do remove one that you no longer want to have on your preferred (auto-connect) list, simply delete it from the list by selecting it and clicking on the “-” button.
To add a new preferred network, click on ~ez_ldquo+ez_rdquo~ and you’ll see:
Type in the name (SSID, base station ID, whatever you want to call it) of the network you want to join, then specify the correct security, if any. If the network does use some sort of password scheme, you’ll be promoted for the network access password too: type that in, click “OK” and you should now have a new preferred network on the list, the network you want to be able to automatically join whenever it’s detected.
how we connect one wifi user with other wifi user automatically?
You can’t really do that, Adil, because wi-fi is designed around a central hub, not as a peer-to-peer network. If you’re on Mac systems, however, you can dabble with Airdrop and see if you can get it to work. I haven’t had much luck with Airdrop personally…
Thank you!! Wow, I’ve had this problem for quite a while. And your solution helped me, though my problem was a little different.
When I looked at the preffered networks, my home network was registrered as having no security. It has, and just removing and adding again made it work. It must be because we changed our wifi password.
What about if you have two preferred networks within range of each other? When my computer wakes up, it diverts to another preferred network and not the local wifi I was operating on. Obviously this is a problem because of the shared network drives, printers etc.
how to do this in Mountain Lion?
When I go to System Preferences and Network, I get the Location window but not “Show” as in your example. How do I get that window so that I can make the new wireless network my automatic network?
Hi,
I have some networks I recently added and they ARE in my preferred networks list, but it STILL asks me to pick my network when I turn on airport.
My location is set to automatic. I don’t know how else to fix it. It must be a bug right?
I was having the same problem. Even though I added my network as a preferred network it would not auto-connect. Turns out I had to change the Location to Automatic (it somehow got switched to “Computer”) and that did the trick!
I have seen that sometimes too, Joel. Frankly, Mac OS X’s implementation of wifi is flakey in a number of ways, this being just one of them. What I have found, though, is if I am just patient, after a few seconds it *does* autoconnect to a preferred network, Next time, instead of manually connecting, give it 10-15 seconds and see what happens.
Hi there,
I have a number of preferred networks set up. Though even though they are set up (and even at the top of the list) when i go into the area to connect to that network it still doesnt auto connect, I have to manually connect every time.
Can you help with this?
funtime thx sionara
WOW. this helped me ALOT 🙂
Thanks Dave 😀