Mac Geekery

I needed to change many iBooks from having a Preferred Network (and wanting to keep looking for that network) to automatically joining any open network and not giving a preference to that certain network.

I found that the two preference files involved were:

• /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
• /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

I also found that the computer name is kept in preferences.plist, so copying these two files out to all the iBooks would have resulted in a same-name-game fiasco. Soooo, my solution was to:

1. Copy /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist out to all the iBooks using Apple Remote Desktop.
2. Issue the following UNIX command as root also using Apple Remote Desktop: sed -i.backup -e ‘s/Ranked/Automatic/’ /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

This command will search through the preferences.plist file for the word Ranked and replace it with the word Automatic.