mobile network
most of you laptop owners have probably experienced having to reset your laptops network settings anytime you change networks. whether it involves setting it to DHCP, or static IP, regardless you spend time doing so. Ultimately for me, i have to change between dhcp and static ip from work and home. I had to do this a lot at my old job, but this was easily solved by only using wireless at work then plugging in at home.
I have wanted a utility for some time now that will manage this for me. I didn’t want a batch file, and i didn’t want some bastardized fix. I wanted something modern and something effective. I like cool software that works. I’m over the console based home brew shit, unless of course its chad or joels home brew.. then its usually something really nice and well done.
I went looking around for a solution and enlisted chad’s expertise. Thanks chad! I actually purchased a product and it is working really well. It is called mobile net switch. It has a very clean and friendly user interface. And I’m a sucker for packaging, but it had the best website and production information and display compared to its competitors.
It has a lot of really useful features and can be quite powerful when utilized. I will probably spend more time messing with it later to see if i got my moneys worth. $32.44 USD.
You don’t have to pay for software to do what you want. If you used DHCP at home (and yes you can have a static address with DHCP just set the lease to last forever). Leave the laptop to use dhcp for everything and it “just works”.
Windows XP also has a little service (Network location identifier, or something like that). It will do the dhcp thing, and determine what “network” you are on at the time and it can go and map drivers and other oddities as needed on a per location basis.
well youre right but at the same point its not, i have a static ip at home, as well as an added internal ip so that i can access my internal shares as well as retaining my static ip.
at work i am purely on dhcp. will and i tried at length before to make it work but as “built in” as it is, it was problematic, slow, and often times troublesome. none of the windows people i knew, had a solution for me that was quick and effective.
this utility is beyond just the basic network profile, it also auto connects you to shared folders based on which profile which i immensely like, and has a lot of independnt settings you can have based on what location you want.
utilities generally always encompass what is “built in”, though they aim to do it better, faster, and with a lot more versatility.
you know, some people consider not having a DHCP server as job security. like here at work.
our nt admin refuses to put everyone on auto-DHCP-assignment even after cheeto and i told him to do so.
I was looking for software to do this a long time ago. But now I’m DHCP everywhere, so I don’t need it. What _I AM_ currently looking for is some solution to my SMTP problem. Cox requires me to use their SMTP server, but I can only access it internally. So when I sent mail from home I need to use cox smtp, and when outside I need to change to a diff SMTP server. pain in the ARSE. I was thinking about creating an SMTP proxy that detects your network and routes properly. You guys know anything?
mobile net switch! its such a powerful little utility that makes shit just easy and so convieient to switch. i highly recommend it.