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Tip : Enable Lion's Airdrop on unsupported Wifi cards / USB dongles

I just have to sharethis.


Lion includes a new technology called "AirDrop" which is Apple's name for adhoc wifi data exchange.


When two machines that both run Lion are visible to each other ( nearby , "ad hoc networked" ) , Users can launch Finder, go to "Airdrop" in the sidebar and will see each others Machine. You then can simply drag and drop all sort of documents onto the icon of the mac next yours without having to think about setting up a network or dig deeply into Networking details.


This new technology is not enabled for all wifi "Airport" cards and never for 3rd party devices ( usb dongles , pci cards etc that have OS X drivers available )


Now here is how to enable Airdrop on EVERY wifi device, regardless of vendor,make or type. The device needs only to work in Lion of course.


fire up the terminal.app and write :



defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1


then hit enter ,


now restart the Finder to have the new sidebar item visible ( a animated radar screen ) with this command :



killall Finder && open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app



Et voila !


Posted on Sep 17, 2011 3:43 AM

Reply
2 replies

Sep 17, 2011 5:16 AM in response to Sjazbec

Keep in mind that this doesn't enable the feature on your Airport card. It just allows Airdrop to run over whatever other network connection your have. Who knows what havoc it might cause on a workplace LAN with lots of users doing the same. I would imagine there is a reason that was not enabled by default. I can't test that, so I couldn't tell for sure what it would do.


Airdrop was intended to use the ad hoc networking of wifi cards that could do simultaneous wifi and ad hoc networks. One computer connected to another for the transfer, not connected to every other computer on the network. This tip enables AirDrop over the regular network connection, not the ad hoc networking of the Airport card.

Tip : Enable Lion's Airdrop on unsupported Wifi cards / USB dongles

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