Remove Preferred Wireless Network on OSX
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So this might seem simple, but when you have a few hundred people doing this by hand would be a huge pain in the rear.
Fortunately Apple being Unix has a tool for this, and it works, just not the way you'd might expect.
Let's say you have 80 out of 200 people who connect to some innocuous wireless network because they weren't paying attention at orientation, and the apple computer they have keeps connecting them to said network every time their computer wakes up.
It's simple to fix and I'm going to be making some assumptions
- You know what wireless networks your users should be connected with
- You know what wireless networks in your office they should not connect with (at least automatically).
- You have remote access with something like Apple Remote Desktop - flaky but it works.
- I'm also making the assumption of what network device is the wireless NIC, in this case en0
Run
networksetup -removepreferredwirelessnetwork en0 'Network Name'
That's it; if the users workstation was defaulting to connecting to a network it shouldn't be, that removes the preference and in essence elevates the other networks that are in the same facility/building. (Your primary network).
This doesn't delete the credentials for those networks, so the user could just easily click on the wifi symbol and connect to them again, but at least this way it won't default to said network.
Which the network preference appears to be based on when you last chose to connect to a network, elevating it above other networks that you as the administrator need your users on.