Mac OSX regards the cur­rent inter­faces as being con­figured with one or more LOCATIONS. You can have many loc­a­tions, and each can have com­pletely indi­vidual set­tings such as IPv6, DNS, and more.

Open the Network Preferences tab in the System Preferences and you will see the cur­rent seet­ing for your IP address.

These are not the set­tings for the Ethernet inter­face that you want to use so lets cre­ate a new Network Location by clikcing the Location drop down.

As you can see I already have the default Automatic loc­a­tion plus two oth­ers that I use (a Guest wire­less net­work and home net­work). Lets cre­ate a new Network Location by press­ing the + button.

Enter a name for the loc­a­tion into the dia­log box and click done.

Changes do not take effect until you press the APPLY but­ton and that’s why it shows as a unknown state.

Now the Ethernet is using DHCP to get its IP address, gate­way and DNS details.

Which is fine, but for most lab or test­ing envir­on­ments, you want to have mul­tiple pro­files. So lets con­fig­ure a manual address, DNS server and some of the other advanced net­work configuration.

First, make sure you have selec­ted the Ethernet port. I have dis­abled the Airport (wire­less) in this example.

Click ADVANCED to con­fig­ure the set­ings for the Ethernet port.

We have quite a few options that can be con­figured from here. Let set a manual IP address, DNS server, and con­fig­ure the proxy server for this connection.

Select the drop down menu to manu­ally con­fig­ure the IP address.

Configure the IP address and the default gate­way that you want to use.

Configure the DNS

I haven’t tested the 802.1x con­fig­ur­a­tion, but this would be use­ful when test­ing dif­fer­ent 802.1x cli­ent configurations.

And fill out your proxy con­fig­ur­a­tion. If you are test­ing for a new proxy deploy­ment this is hugely use­ful, since you can quickly switch pro­files for each of the proxy serv­ers in your cluster.

Click OK to apply these changes.

Switching Locations

You have now con­figured and applied the Network Profile. You can eas­ily switch between the Locations by open System Preferences, Network, and using the Location menu which is just a bit too manual for me.

This next sec­tion cov­ers a tool called Network Location from <a href=“http://networklocationapp.com/”>http://networklocationapp.com/</a> to help auto­mate the switch­ing of locations.

You can always open the System Preferences, Network and change the con­figured loc­a­tions. But I use a piece of soft­ware call Network Location to provide me with a menu list from the Tool Bar of OSX and that will be the sub­ject of my next post which makes mul­tiple net­work pro­files even easier.