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Tiger Still Resists Showing Preferred Networks

Tiger Still Resists Showing Preferred Networks — Last week, I explained how to force a Mac OS X system upgraded from Panther to Tiger to display a list of preferred AirPort networks in the Network preferences pane that you could edit, remove, add to, or rearrange by preferred order of connections (see "Adding Tiger’s AirPort Preferred Network List" in TidBITS-794). Several readers wrote in to say that their upgraded Tiger systems still wouldn’t provide a preferred list.

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08223>

These notes make it increasingly clear that we’re encountering a larger bug than I originally suspected, one that suppresses this option of seeing which network your computer "prefers" based on whether you agreed to remember the network in the future when connecting to it. Another way to work around this bug is to create an entirely new location setting and set up AirPort from scratch within that location, but even this workaround isn’t always effective.

One reader with an otherwise perfectly functional Tiger system sees a blank list of networks. Clicking the plus (+) sign doesn’t bring up a dialog. Creating a new location setting didn’t fix the problem either. At a loss, I suggested reinstalling Mac OS X, which is such a Windows thing to do, but I can’t see how he might otherwise be able to resolve the fundamental networking issues. [GF]


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