I just changed the Macbook Pro to connect to the router via cable instead of wireless.

[BudVitoff]

1) How do I know that it's actually using the ethernet cable and not still going wireless?
2) When the grandkids come over, their phones will be going wireless to the router. Can I assume that the router will accept both methods simultaneously?

 

[ferrarr]

Turn off Wi-Fi, in System Preferences > Network. N


Sent from my iPad using Mac-Forums

 

[chscag]

1. It should do it automatically when you attach the ethernet cable, however, you can check by opening System Preferences, Network. You do not want to turn off WiFi if you want your grandkids to be able to use it when they come over.

2. Yes, as long as you keep WiFi on, the system will allow both the ethernet connection and WiFi for the iPhones or iPad.

 

[krs]

You do not want to turn off WiFi if you want your grandkids to be able to use it when they come over.

Depends where you turn off WiFi.
If you log into the router and turn off WiFi there, nobody will be able to use it.
But if you turn off WiFi on your Mac only (not the router), then others can use Wifi and you will use ethernet (with a cable connected of course).
I turn WiFi on my Mac off and on simply by going to the WiFi icon in the main (top) toolbar

 

[chscag]

But if you turn off WiFi on your Mac only (not the router), then others can use Wifi and you will use ethernet (with a cable connected of course).

That is correct. I should have mentioned it but thinking that you may not be familiar with how it all works...

Anyway, follow the advice by member "krs" and you should be okay for when the grandkids come over.

 

[MacInWin]

And if not, the grands will be able to fix it for you...

 

[chscag]

And if not, the grands will be able to fix it for you...

LOL.

Reminds me of that old joke: "So easy, that a child could do it". (Disclaimer: Child not included.)

 

[BudVitoff]

OMG, you are so-o-o right about the grandkids knowing how to fix it. I'm supposed to be the IT guru for the family, after 50+ years as a programmer; but with all the new-fangled stuff, I'm worthless. That's not just computers, by the way. The iPhone was a challenge, too; and I just bought a 2010 Buick Enclave with more buttons, knobs, displays, etc. along with its inch-thick user manual. My 14-year-old granddaughter has no problem answering all of my questions.

Macwin: Thanks for explaining things. That flight deck looks awfully small from the air.

 

[MacInWin]

Bud, that flight deck IS awfully small from the air, particularly at night...

 

[pm-r]

Bud, that flight deck IS awfully small from the air, particularly at night...

I cannot imagine how you guys did it... Night or day!!!

I take my hat off to all of you...






- Patrick
======

 

[MacInWin]

Nothing to it, Patrick!

 

[Slydude]

I cannot imagine how you guys did it... Night or day!!!

I take my hat off to all of you...


- Patrick
======

Ditto what he said.

I can't believe I've looked at the pic who knows how many times and didn't realize it was a flight deck.


Which carrier? Or will knowing the answer lead to my demise under mysterious circumstances?

 

[pm-r]

Nothing to it, Patrick!
View attachment 31574

Yeah right...!!! And you are coming in and approaching at how many miles an hour... Or do you use nautical miles per hour???

Still bloody fast, and then the G forces (arresting cable) must be something else!!!




- Patrick
======

 

[MacInWin]

Sly, no secret. My avatar is the USS America, CVA-66 (You can see the number on the deck at the of the ship. It's also usually painted on the island.)

Patrick, the A-6 landing speed was, as I recall, about 132 knots (about 152 MPH). The ship tried to get 20 knots of wind over the deck to lower the closing speed, so if it was 20 knots WOD, then the difference between ship and aircraft was about 112 knots, about 129 MPH. Once the hook engaged a wire across the deck, you slowed to a stop in about 300 feet or so. A few G, nothing brutal. (You did have to remember to lock the harness assembly or your face met the dashboard abruptly. Usually that happened once to each crew member, then you remembered that sort-of key step.

I was a bombardier/navigator, sat to the right of the pilot. The picture was, I think from another B/N who just stuck the camera on the dashboard as they got close in. Based on the picture, I'd say they are about 5 seconds from landing, slightly high and to the left of the centerline. (You can see the high from the green and amber lights to the left of the landing area. The amber light should be exactly on a line with the green bars to be exactly on glideslope. You can see the slightly left of center from the centerline of the deck and the line going down the stern. It makes a very slight arrow pointing to the right. When exactly on centerline, the line is absolutely straight. The ship is, of course moving slightly to the right because the deck is angled and you approach from an angle, so the current setup is going to end up with a landing slightly to the left of centerline. Fortunately, nothing is parked on that side. The A-6 just fits between the two lines on either side of the landing area, with the hatched area as a bit of buffer for off center landings.

And now you know a lot more about carrier landings than you ever need! I have 650 of them, 350 at night. But I was young and stupid at the time and somehow it just seemed "normal."

 

[MacInWin]

Here is the full picture that I used part of for my avatar. You can see my pilot, callsign Piglet, in the picture.



But we've hijacked this thread, so I'll stop posting ancient history for now.

 

[BudVitoff]

Okay, everybody come back! We've got problems with the installation we've been talking about.

The site belongs to Barb (my ex), and she has a 2013 Macbook Pro. Last Thursday I connected the ethernet cable to the router and kept the wi-fi on. This cable is black with ethernet tips, not the typical yellow 6E cable I would ordinarily use for this connection. It's also fifty feet long, even though I only needed about 25 feet to cover the distance, because that's all I had handy. I don't know what's written on the black cable. The router is hiding behind the couch across the room with the Mac. That’s because both Barb and our daughter, Holly, could "feel the the router in their bodies" and it was very uncomfortable, so I moved it in the hopes of reducing the effects of EMF radiation. They saw an immediate improvement. If any of this is something that should raise a red flag, I wanted to tell you about it.

Just after I left the forum earlier, I remoted into her site to shut off the wi-fi in the menubar. Coincidentally, she messaged me about the Mac being hot yesterday and turning off "everything I could turn off and it didn't help." She's used to the Mac running hot when running Zoom, but this time she didn't have Zoom on. At the moment, it was "really hot". She was worried that the Mac might get damaged. Shortly after shutting off wi-fi, she complained that she "couldn't get anything off the internet right now." So it would appear that the system was depending on wi-fi for internet access, and adding the ethernet connection makes it overheat. In view of what chscag and krs said, something else is messing things up, but what?

There is one more incidental item that you wouldn’t think would have any bearing on the case, but you never know. Barb asked, "So how do you tell the cable to stop?". I said, "Unplug the white wire from the hub." Then I went on to explain that the white wire was just a few inches long and coupled to the black ethernet cable; and its function was to convert it to use a USB port on the hub, since the Mac did not have an ethernet port.

That’s the situation, guys. Who wants to be first?

 

[MacInWin]

Lots of moving parts in there, Bud. First, the color of the cable shouldn't matter, as long as it's properly wired to the connectors. Nor is the length really an issue, as long as it is shielded, which it should be. Tell us more about he "white wire" converter. That may be part of the communications problem.

To verify connectivity, on the MBP open System Preferences, Network and in the resulting panel there should be a list of interfaces in the box on the left. There are dots beside the interfaces to show status. Green means live and functioning. Red is not in use. So on the MBP there should be a green dot beside the name of the ethernet adapter (I presume that is what the "white wire" is.) and a red dot beside the WiFi interface as it is turned off. If that is the case, you have connection to the router. If the dot is not green, then no connection. I think there is a yellow condition where it has the router but no internet, but I can't seem to find a reference. Here is all I could find at Apple: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-network-utility-on-mac-ntutl001/10.15/mac/10.15

Also, on the right side of the panel is a "Status" section that will tell you if it sees the router, has an IP and is active or not. Below that are the various addresses the router is issuing to the machine. The IP Address should be something in the 192.126.x.y range or maybe 10.x.x.x range. If it is any other, that probably means it is not connecting and has self assigned an IP. The Configure IPv4 box should read "Using DHCP." The Router should be at 192.168.1.1, or 10.1.1.1. The DNS server will most likely be assigned by the router, but you can manually set it on the Advanced tab.

The Wifi settings are similar, except that it also shows the Network Name of the WiFi network it is attached to. That should be the router name, although if there is another router nearby and you have not turned off WiFi at the MBP, it may have attached to that network if it didn't require a password. The way to make sure the MBP does not use WiFi is to turn it off at the MBP by either clicking on the fan shaped icon on the top bar to get the menu with the on/off selection, or in the System Preferences/Network panel, select WiFi and then turn it off there. Either way ends up at the same result. The icon on the top bar will stop showing bars for strength and show an empty fan icon for no connection.

Heat I cannot address. Not being there to see what is going on, the best suggestion is to open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder and look at the CPU tab to see what is using the CPU so hard that it is heating up. The processes can be sorted by clicking on the "% CPU" header of the column until the heaviest user is at the top of the list. Sometimes a browser can have a runaway process, particularly if there are a lot of dynamic ads on the pages that are open, but I've never seen it get so bad the MBP overheated.

As for the "feel the the router in their bodies" comment, the signals from most WiFi routers are not very strong and should not produce any perceptible effects. The signal weakens with the square of the distance from the router, so by the time it reaches the MBP it's microvolts at best. However, there is also a transmitter in the MBP to send the signal back to the router, and the user is much closer to the MBP, so the signal strength from the MBP should be larger than the signal strength from the router, to the user. I'm not saying that they can't actually feel the effects in their bodies, but the science says that turning off the WiFi at the MBP should have a larger effect than turning off the router, or hiding it behind the couch. Typical WiFi routers have a maximum signal of 100mW output. The MBP has a similar transmitter, and although I could not find the power of that transmitter in a quick search, the WiFi standard is for symmetrical operations, so the transmitter in the MBP is probably on the same scale, 100mW. So one would think that the effect on the body would be greater from the MBP than from the router. Maybe they should not use WiFi for any purpose, including in their mobile phones, as they are even closer in use.

 

[krs]

A very comprehensive and precise reply by Jake.

Nothing I can add at this time other than to suggest to take one issue at a time.

The easiest is probably the issue that with just the ethernet cable connected, the Mac can't access the internet.
As Jake said - the connection status will be shown in Network preferences on the Mac

 

[pm-r]

They saw an immediate improvement. If any of this is something that should raise a red flag, I wanted to tell you about it.

To be honest, I'm more concerned about the situation with Barb, your ex you say, and your daughter and the effects of the router and where they and the router are all located:

Barb and our daughter, Holly, could "feel the the router in their bodies" and it was very uncomfortable

Maybe their bodies are interfering with the Wi-Fi signals and maybe if you got some of those aluminum suits some firefighters wear would help with any protection and may even help improve the signal.

But Jake seems to have the situation and the proper answers well in hand and can actually type with a straight face while I am just wondering if someone is not just trying to pull one of our legs???







- Patrick
======

 

[BudVitoff]

Since it's 4:30 AM at the moment, I'm not going to start my trek through Macinwin's tome just yet. OTOH, there are some additional items that I want to add now, to let you think about them while I sleep.

First, with all due respect to Macwin, I have a personal practice that I wish everyone had, namely: When I write a document, the first time I use an abbreviation, I precede it with its original value so that the reader associates the two for the remainder of the document. In this case, I wish he had said "... Macbook Pro (MBP)". I didn't know what MBP meant until I read the whole thing and it finally sank in. :Blushing:

Re the white cable: The MBP does not have an ethernet port, and only two USB ports, so it's typical to have a USB hub that plugs into one of those ports; but we're talking about an ethernet cable. So all this white cable does is input the ethernet tip and output a USB tip that plugs into the hub. I doubt that this causes any kind of problem.

I got a message from Barb today that blew my mind. She told me that the MBP was still very hot, and that she could not shut it down! Not with the power key nor with the Apple shutdown option. She had to pull the plug from the wall socket. When I heard that, my first thought was "Okay, this is not a software thing, it's a hardware problem." My next thought was that this MBP is seven years old, and it's never been cleaned -- I wouldn't be surprised if it was full of dust that needed to be blown out. I found websites that told how to clean out a laptop, and where she could buy a can of compressed air. She said that she was not going to take the back off of the MBP -- she would take it into Best Buy and have them do it for her. And that's where we left it.

Finally, I'm concerned about pm-r's "wondering if someone is not just trying to pull one of our legs???" I could be wrong, but the only thing that comes to my mind is that he's talking about Barb and Holly. He can rest assured that nothing is further from the truth. These two are dead serious about this. They are both avid schooled homeopaths. I know all too well, because I spent $20k for Holly's 4-years of weekend schooling on this stuff, and because I'm close to it, I've seen what this often-criticized profession can do. Admittedly, there are a few practices that I find hard to accept, but I won't go into them here. Also, just recently I spend $200 on an EMF meter to help Holly detect and possibly avoid hot spots.

Okay, now it's 5:30 AM. I'm gonna hit the sack, so that when I wake up I'll have the strength to tackle Macwin's article.