This morning I noticed some weirdness in the way my MacBook behaves when it automatically switches among network connections.
My cousin Bryan hooked me up with an external drive with a ton of tunes that I want to copy over to my server in the basement. With this kind of copying, it makes sense to use my 100MB ethernet connection instead of the WiFi. It’s a lot faster.
I futzed around a bit with my network location settings for “Home” to tell my MacBook to use the ethernet cable if it’s available and if it’s not, then to switch over to AirPort. This works like a champ. You can plug and unplug the cable and the connection bounces from cable to wifi and back again without a hitch. Here’s the weirdness though.
- Connect to my shared drive in the basement with the ethernet plugged in and I can transfer files at around 12MB/s which is about right.
- Unplug the cable and the connection speed drops to about 3MB/s which is about right for WiFi.
- However, when I plug the cable back in, the connection to the server appears to remain on the AirPort/WiFi connection (as my connection speed doesn’t increase) instead of picking back up on the ethernet cable connection. If I force the AirPort/WiFi connection off, the speed bounces back up to 10+MB/s.
So but anyway, I really dig the smartness of my MacBook being able to use whatever connection is available but I wish it would respect the priority that I assign to the devices in my network location preferences.
