Disable the ability to connect to wireless

[MrPeppah]

Hello,

I am not sure if I am looking for the wrong item or not wording my search correctly to find anything relevant but is there a way to disable or delete the wireless connection or options on our Macs that are hardwired with ethernet. We have students connecting to our wireless that requires authentication which then breaks the connection to the internet. They assume because it's not on wireless it loads slower or doesn't have internet. 

The only configuration item I see under the configuration profile is to define a SSID, but I'd like to disable it all together.

[Daku]

Hello,

I have a .pkg that disables the wireless connection of any mac as soon as you connect the wired, once you disconnect the wired the wireless connection comes back on. Try it on your test Mac, let me know if that's helpful

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BzlyzZRfWeF-tqwgJiqEWzMwhzws_rL3/view?usp=sharing

[Kristopher]

If someone wanted to remove this, how would you go about doing that?

[AJPinto]

I had a ticket open with Apple on this very topic last week. MacOS has no built in function to do this. The closest thing apple has built in to macOS is configuring the network service order, which is far from ideal. I have elected to not try to force macOS to do something its not designed to do.

I use this script to configure the network service order, we have wifi top but that could be changed.

#!/bin/bash

######################
# Script Name: Configuration_Order_Network_Services
# Author: 
# Date: 
# Purpose: Promote the desired network Service to the 1st in the service order list
######################


######################
# Global Variables
######################


# echos the current network service order before the script makes changes. grep needs to be cleaned up.
Adapter_all=$(networksetup -listnetworkserviceorder | awk '{print $2}')

echo " "
echo "*********************************************"
echo "Being script:"
echo "*********************************************"
echo " "
echo "==============="
echo "Current Network Service order:"
echo "==============="
echo "$Adapter_all"
echo "==============="
echo " "
echo " "

new_top_net_service_name='Wi-Fi' # Change this to the name of the new desired top network service.


######################
# Script function
######################


echo " "
new_net_service_order="$(networksetup -listallnetworkservices | AWK_ENV_TOP_NET_SERVICE="${new_top_net_service_name}" awk '{ if (NR == 1) { print ENVIRON["AWK_ENV_TOP_NET_SERVICE"] } else if ($0 != ENVIRON["AWK_ENV_TOP_NET_SERVICE"]) { print $0 } }')"
	echo "==============="
	echo "New Network Service Order:"
    echo "==============="
    echo "$new_net_service_order"
	echo "==============="
	IFS=$'\n'
	networksetup -ordernetworkservices ${new_net_service_order}
	unset IFS
	
    
echo " "
echo "*********************************************"
echo "End script:"
echo "*********************************************"
exit 0

@Daku That is a crafty little package you have there Richard. May want to sign it, and and move it to github or just provide the source files so people dont need to override gatekeeper to see what you are doing. Comes off as very phishy. I would probably remove the email address from the pre-install script and pay load scripts also :).

[mmcallister]

You can turn Wi-Fi off with 

sudo networksetup -setairportpower Wi-Fi off  

[wifichallenges]

While this does work, the user can very trivially turn it back on.

[mmcallister]

Please see this related post that may help you.  

https://community.jamf.com/t5/jamf-pro/restrict-ability-to-turn-off-airport/m-p/102907

[wifichallenges]

A better option and actually the root cause, was that apparently in sonoma it has been depreciated the old commands to restrict joining and turning on and off wireless to admin only.

This post discusses the work around from apple that they want you to do now, however i cant get it to work currently.

https://community.jamf.com/t5/jamf-pro/wifi-advanced-settings-replacement-command-for-airport/m-p/31...

then wireless off can be restricted to admin to turn it back on.  All those commands in the old post have been depreciated (thanks apple...). i did post that note at the bottom of that page if you did read it.