How To: Turn off Wireless Card

Standard

We run the following on all macs with a wireless card as a offline policy via Casper at logout.

This script will:

  1. Enable the wireless service if it’s not been enabled.
  2. Clear any set DNS servers & search domains (can be turned off for 10.4, reasoning is that 10.5+ can receive DNS from DHCP)
  3. Turns off the wireless card.

The script itself has been built from a few scripts contained within Caspers Resource Kit & then modified for 10.7+ by myself.

2 thoughts on “How To: Turn off Wireless Card

  1. Thanks for this, used your 10.7 hackery and rewrote the setAirPortNetwork.sh

    if [ “$SSID” == “” ]; then
    echo “Error: The parameter ‘SSID’ is blank. Please specify a SSID.”
    exit 1
    fi

    OS=`/usr/bin/sw_vers -productVersion | /usr/bin/colrm 5`

    if [[ “$OS” < "10.6" ]]; then
    echo "Setting airport SSID to $SSID…"
    /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -z -A"$SSID" –password="$password"
    else
    checkWireless=$(networksetup -listallhardwareports | egrep "Hardware Port: (Air|Wi-)" | cut -c 16-)
    # First we need to get the Wi-Fi device's name
    wifiDevice=`/usr/sbin/networksetup -listallhardwareports | awk '/^Hardware Port: Wi-Fi/,/^Ethernet Address/' | head -2 | tail -1 | cut -c 9-`
    echo "Turning off the Wireless for OS $OS…"
    /usr/sbin/networksetup -setairportnetwork "$wifiDevice" "$SSID" "$password"
    fi

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