. Network Central—and Multihoming In this chapter, you'll be spending a lot of time in the Network pane of System System Preferences; click Network.) This list Preferences (Figure 18-1).(Choose summarizes the ways your Mac can connect to the Internet or an office network | . Network Central and Multihoming In this chapter you ll be spending a lot of time in the Network pane of System Preferences Figure 18-1 . Choose System Preferences click Network. This list summarizes the ways your Mac can connect to the Internet or an office network Ethernet AirPort wireless Bluetooth FireWire cellular modem card VPN Chapter 22 and so on and how each connection is doing. Figure 18-1. The network connections listed here are tagged with color-coded dots. A green dot means turned on and connected to a network yellow means working but not connected at the moment red means you haven t yet set up a connection method. There s quite a bit going on here in this radically redesigned control panel for example it completely replaces the old Internet Connect program. Now you set up all your network connections here and you can connect and disconnect to all your networks here. . Multihoming What you may not realize is that the order of the network connections listed here is important. That s the sequence the Mac uses as it tries to get online. If one of your programs needs Internet access and the first method isn t hooked up the Mac switches to the next available connection automatically. In fact Mac OS X can maintain multiple simultaneous network connections Ethernet AirPort dial-up even FireWire a feature known as multihoming. This feature is especially relevant for laptops. When you open your Web browser your laptop might first check to see if it s at the office plugged into a cable modem via an Ethernet cable which is the fastest most secure type of connection. If there s no Ethernet it looks for an AirPort network. Finally if it draws a blank there the laptop reluctantly dials the modem. It may not be the fastest Internet connection but it s all you ve got at the moment. Here s how to go about setting up the connection attempt sequence you want 1. Open System Preferences. Click the Network icon. The Network Status screen Figure 18-1 brings home .
