Author: Vinod Rawat

When you’re carrying around a laptop looking for a network connection, most of the networks you encounter are basically plug-and-play: they use DHCP to issue an IP address and dynamically manage what clients are on the network, and when a connection is established, OS X will automatically configure it. This works well in most settings, but sometimes a network will have specific configuration requirements such as manual IP address assignment, multicasting setups that isolate logical networks over the same hardware, or authentication schemes that have special hardware requirements. In these instances, while you can continually access your network settings and adjust them accordingly, an easier solution is to configure a new network location for OS X that you can quickly switch to when needed.