Problems switching between wired and wireless

[MamaWildBear]

I have several odd networking problem with my Snow Leopard Mac and am hoping someone can help.

My Mac has trouble switching between the wired and wireless connections. If the wireless (Airport) is enabled and I'm also plugged in via the wired ethernet connection, access to the Internet is very slow. If I turn off airport, everything speeds up. It would seem like the machine ought to know which is the faster connection and just use that but it doesn't.

What happens is that I end up manually disabling the Airport whenever I plug in to the network directly. My other problem is that when I unplug from the network, the Mac doesn't seem to realize it. Even if I turn Airport back on, it still continues to try to use the disconnected wired connection so I lose access to the Internet. I have to go into networking preferences and disable the ethernet interface before it will realize it should use the wireless connection.

It seems to be like this should be a bit more automatic. It is getting really irritating. Any ideas?

I have Snow Leopard 10.6.2.

 

[Alrescha]

It seems to be like this should be a bit more automatic.

You're right, it should be automatic. It is on my Macbook.

If you are in System Preference/Network with wireless turned on and you plug in your Ethernet cable, you should see the Ethernet connection go green and slide to the top of the interfaces list.

If it doesn't switch between green and red automatically, you may have a hardware or cable problem.

If it doesn't slide to the top of the list, you might want to check the service order, click on the little pulldown box next to the + and - at the bottom of the interfaces list and choose 'Set Service Order'. You want to make sure that Ethernet comes before Airport in that list.

In my case both interfaces are set to use DHCP. My wired and wireless networks are the same, so the interfaces end up with different IP addresses on the same network.

A.