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Network monitoring makes it easy for network administrators to effectively take decisions and schedule tasks related to periodic maintenance. This keeps the performance of a network optimized and ensures high network availability for the users.

Sure enough: networksetup -setairportnetwork Airport 'Your SSID Here' 'Network Pa$$wOrd Here' did just what I wanted, and it did not require an administrator password or sudo. If you need to get a listing of all of the current Wi-Fi networks which are broadcasting SSIDs, you can use 'airport -s' for a list which will also show what security measures are used. By the way, if you aren't familiar with networksetup, you should definitely read up on it. It has a lot of features that could come in handy. It also wields a great amount of power, so be careful. The command listed above is fairly innocuous but there is a lot more it can do.

Propagator provides a GUI for pushing out files to Macs on your local network. This is useful for OS X system administrators who wish to update all of their managed client machines with a specific file, most commonly property list (.plist) files. This functionality can also be achieved using Apple Remote Desktop, but a free alternative is always worth taking a look. My two favorite aspects of Propagator are its Common Places drop down menu for quickly specifying common locations to drop files (such as long ~/Library paths), and it's Set Ownership check box for giving proper ownership of the file to the right user accounts. The option to Lock Files After Copy prevents users (in my case, students and unknowing faculty) from messing with your work, accidentally or not.