Got a question from Enrico,
“Good morning Steve, and Happy New Year!…I would like that when the user has a wired NIC up and running, the wireless NIC is automatically disabled, and as soon as the wired NIC disconnects, the wireless NIC activates.
This prevents the user to have both NICs up and running at the same time and above all prevents wireless access points to collapse for too many unneeded simultaneous connections.”
Awesome question Enrico.
There are other reasons for wanting this too. If you have both connections running, things like file transfers, or anything that needs the extra speed of Ethernet…might end up going through the wireless instead.
For this question, I have created a VB Script that will receive the names of the two network cards in its command line parameters.
For example, if you look at your network connections:
See the descriptions for them? That is what you will use to identify them.
If you wanted to watch the “Local Area Connection” adapter…and then switch the “Wireless Connection” Adapter, you would call the script like this:
The program will not display anything, but run in the background looking for the change. It will continue to run until the user logs out.
If the Local Area Connection is no longer connected, it will automatically enable the Wireless connection.
The reverse is true…if Local Area Connection becomes available, it will automatically disable the wireless connection.
The best place to run the script would be from a group policy computer configuration logon script (Not a user configuration) because it will run as local system and have the proper permission to enable and disable network cards.
You can get the script from here:
For 2003, Vista, Windows 7, and 2008:
NetSwitch.dat
For Windows XP:
Just rename to NetSwitch.vbs after downloading.
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