Subtitles of the Movie

The last wireless client we're going to look at is a Mac OS10 client. The wireless configuration for Mac OS10 clients is very similar to both Windows and Linux. You can use both command line and Gui methods, just like Linux and Windows. Mac OS10's almost exclusively use AirPort cards. Most of them are built in to the systems themselves and they're manufactured by Apple. They're proprietary. The older cards are AirPort 802.11B cards. The newer ones, the AirPort Extremes, are 802.11G cards. And, of course, Mac provides full support for some of the higher-level security protocols, such as WPA2. Now, in order to configure a Mac OS10 client, you basically need the same information as you would use with a Windows or Linux client. You need to know the network name or SSID. If it's a network that uses encryption, you'll need to know the WEP or the WPA key. And any other wireless configuration preferences your network may require. Let's go ahead and look at configuring a Mac OS10 Tiger wireless client. We're going to look at the GUI and the command line. And we're going to first look at the way you can configure the client through GUI. We're going to come up here and click on the little icon here at the top. And that's going to be the icon for the AirPort itself. You see we have several options. We can turn the AirPort on or off and the reason we might want to turn it off is in case we don't want to connect to wireless networks, uh, for a while. We don't want to automatically connect or we want to save power if we're on battery with a laptop. And here are the wireless networks we're showing right now and we're connected to the king network, which we know is an unsecured wireless network. We also show the queen network. Let's go ahead and show you exactly how to connect to the queen network. We could just click the little checkbox, but I'll show you how to connect to it. You're going to need to know the network name. And we know that that network name or SSID is queen. So we're going to type that in. And we also need to know what the, uh, encryption is. Now, we have a wide variety of encryption methods we can choose from. We're going to go with a, uh, WEP 40 128-bit hex and it's going to give us the box so we can type that in and we're going to type that in. We'll say ok. Now we're starting the connection. Now, we see our little icon, it looks like it's gained in strength here. It looked a little weak a while ago. Let's click that and we're connected to the queen network. That's all there is really to the GUI method of turning it off and on and connecting. Now we're going to take a little bit of a look at the command line way to do it in Mac. Ok. We're now at a terminal prompt and as you can see, we're in a rather long path here, several directories deep. Matter of fact, let me show you exactly where we're at. We're in a system library private frameworks Apple Inter211.framework, versions A resources. Now, Apple has buried a, uh, really cool command line script that can configure the AirPort in this directory. And we do an LS, we can see that the, uh, script is right there. It's called AirPort. And what we have to do is just call that script. And I'm going to go ahead and, uh, use the -H option just to show you what the different arguments are. If you run the, uh, AirPort script there with several options, you can connect to wireless networks. You can specify SSIDs. You can specify WEP keys and so forth. You can associate to networks, uh, all kinds of things you can do. And you may be asking, why would I want to tie up all this in just to configure a wireless network card, vise, doing it at the GUI? And the reason you might want to is the ability to script this. You can actually script this and then import it from box to box and just run the script or have the use to run the script and then you don't have to worry about going to each box and figuring out the GUI. So that might be one good reason why you might want to do this. In any case, that is kind of how you do it. I'm not actually going to do it at the, uh, command prompt here. I'm just showing you the options you can use. But that's how you would do it at the command prompt. So now we've looked at the GUI and command prompt method of doing, connecting to a wireless network from a Mac PowerBook G4.