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Comments on How do I temporarily disconnect a Mac from the network without touching cables?

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How do I temporarily disconnect a Mac from the network without touching cables?

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A workaround to a problem I'm having with an application on my Mac (desktop machine) is to disconnect from the network before launching the program. I headed over to the network settings to look for a way to do that, but didn't find anything like "disconnect" or "disable" in the UI, and I sure don't want to change settings to cause it to fail. I had to physically disconnect the Ethernet cable.

I'm using Mac OS 10.12.6 (Sierra) on a Mac Mini with a wired connection (not WiFi). My cable management is, um, not good, but even if it were, there's a lot of stuff plugged in in close quarters, and unplugging things risks disturbing other things and that's a hassle. I'd like to be able to disconnect and then reconnect using my keyboard and mouse. Is this possible?

network macos10
posted over 3 years ago
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Monica Cellio‭ staff
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If your goal is to only disconnect certain apps, you can use tools like

to block the network access of the particular app instead of disconnecting your whole computer.

posted over 3 years ago
3y ago
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samcarter‭
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Lulu solved my problem (4 comments)
Lulu solved my problem
Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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Thanks for this suggestion. I installed Lulu and was able to configure it to always block the problematic application. I've set it to ask about other outbound connections, which I can whitelist as I go if I trust them -- this seems useful for passively monitoring for potential malware. (I mean, my security hygiene is pretty good, but nobody's perfect and malware purveyors are constantly trying to improve their efforts.)

samcarter‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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Monica Cellio‭ Glad to hear that this works for you! Thanks for the feedback! I'm using Lulu now for over a month (after my old program was no longer compatible with the current operation system) and so far I don't have any reason for complains (with is the ultimate aim for an application which runs in the background)

samcarter‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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Monica Cellio‭ ... and thanks for the shoutout on twitter! Tom was so nice to forward it to me (I'm not on twitter myself)

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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Thanks samcarter‭ -- I don't have a lot of experience with managing firewalls, and was surprised that the Mac-native one doesn't support this use case, so I definitely appreciated the pointer to something that's easy and effective. As for Twitter, there are "Sam Carter"s but that didn't help me tell if any of them were you. Now I know.