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Lord Hamsa

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 16, 2013
698
675
While admittedly the problem about to describe has to do with OS X and iOS, it's the iCloud sync between them that's leading to me issue.

My office has a rather restrictive firewall - totally their right to do so, but I do like to, say, read an article from a sports site once in a while when I'm taking a break or use TeamSnap to organize volunteers for my son's soccer team. I use my iPhone to do that sort of surfing while my MBP is hooked up to the company network to do more work-related stuff like timesheets, looking up technical docs, etc.

The company just added WiFi to the office LAN (been using an ethernet-to-USB adapter for wired access), and here's where my conundrum begins - if I want to have access to the WiFi on the MBP, such as for taking it with me to a conference room for note-taking or team research, I need to have it on the MBP's list of known networks. When I do that, iCloud syncs the known network to my iPhone, meaning that it will try to use that instead of LTE, but then subjects my phone to the firewall.

So, my options, as far as I can tell, are:

1) Tell my computer not to remember the network. This might be the better solution, as I don't need to "roam" with it often. But the password is complex enough to not be easy to remember, so I'd have to keep that password on me whenever I do need it. Yuck.

2) Turn WiFi off on my phone while at the office, which is my current solution. Not particularly burdensome, but I have noticed that I sometimes forget to turn WiFi back on when I leave, meaning some needless chewing up of LTE data. Plus, Continuity features don't seem to work as well when WiFi is turned off.

Ideally, I'd like to simply have a feature that says: join this specific network manually while auto-joining other networks you know about. But in absence of that, does anyone have a recommendation to work around the problem? Is there some way I could use a VPN or other third-party network stack to be my "switch" to turn on this specific network just for my MBP?
 

Rigby

macrumors 603
Aug 5, 2008
6,210
10,148
San Jose, CA
You can prevent the syncing of the Wifi credentials by turning off iCloud Keychain on the Mac. Apart from that, I don't think there is a way to prevent the phone from connecting without switching Wifi off.
 
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