Network Connection Prioritization

[Brian]

Hello There,

One of the users in my office asked me if there was
a way to automatically disable a wireless network
connection if a wired connection is present. I've done a
little searching through XP, but I didn't see any obvious
answers.

Would this have to be scripted through something
like netsh? Does anyone have any suggestions? Please
let me know if you do.

Thanks in advance,
Brian

 

[Chuck]

Hello There,

One of the users in my office asked me if there was
a way to automatically disable a wireless network
connection if a wired connection is present. I've done a
little searching through XP, but I didn't see any obvious
answers.

Would this have to be scripted through something
like netsh? Does anyone have any suggestions? Please
let me know if you do.

Thanks in advance,
Brian

Brian,

If you have two active network connections which both access the same network,
you can use the static route table to assign one connection a higher cost than
the other. When both connections are available (when the wired connection is
connected), the connection with the lower cost will be used.
<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/cableguy/cg1201.mspx>

You can set the cost, for each connection, thru Settings - Network Connections -
(select the network connection) - Properties - TCP/IP - Properties - Advanced -
IP Settings. If you uncheck Automatic metric, you can change the wired
connection metric to 5, and the wireless connection to 10. So if both are
available, the wired connection will be used by preference.

Cheers,
Chuck
Paranoia comes from experience - and is not necessarily a bad thing.

 

[Jetro]

Windows assigns the cost of interface (metric) on-the-fly analysing its
declared speed. Thus 100Mbps interface (wired adapter) metric is lower than
11/22/54Mbps interface (wireless adapter) metric and IP packets are routed
on more effective (best) 100Mbps interface. If you got 108Mbps wireless
adapter, change the appropriate metric similar to

route change 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 metric 2 if {interfaceNo}

netsh int del int [name=]<string> deletes a particular interface at the
router completely.

If this is a PCMCIA adapter just eject it.

BTW using scripts/batches is semi-automatic approach.