So, here I am at my brother’s house in Atlanta, GA for Thanksgiving. He has an “snow” Apple Airport base station setup using WEP encyrption and with no SSID broadcasting.
The sad thing was that every time I woke my laptop up from sleep it refused to automatically re-connect to the network.
Now I knew that if the network was broadcasting an SSID that I would have been given a checkbox to mark to “Save the password,” but I doubted that my brother was going to lower his security levels just for me. Knowing that there had to be a solution to this problem that did not involve an major security risks, I set out to find it.
In a thread on the forums at macosxhints.com I found a reference to the property list for the Airport configurations.
This file is named com.apple.airport.preferences.plist and it is kept at the following location /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration.
What I found was that in this file under the branch List of known networks there is a child for each of the Airport networks that has been “saved.” After investigating this, what I found was the listing for my brother’s network was missing the key for SecurityType.
Seemed easy enough to add the new child to the network key at set the name of the property and the value. Only problem was that even after opening the file using sudo /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist I was informed that I did not have the requisite permissions to save the changes. Undaunted, I changed the permissions on the file, made my changes, then put the permissions back.
Now after waking from sleep, my latop recognizes the network as it should. And all is well in laptop land.