Communication Hardware policy does not enable Wi-Fi adapter

  • 7014089
  • 12-Nov-2013
  • 19-Nov-2013

Environment

Novell ZENworks Endpoint Security Management 11.2 Policies

Situation

Communication Hardware policy settings are configured to Disable Wi-Fi When Wired.
Devices have an additional virtual adapter.

No wireless networking after disconnecting from LAN
After disconnecting device from wired networking, the wireless adapter keeps being disabled or gets disabled again shortly after manually enabling the adapter.

Resolution

Workaround:
Disable the Novell ZENworks Location Awareness driver on the affected network adapter.

Cause

The virtual adapter is registered as a wired adapter in Windows and also recognized by the ZCM agent as a wired adapter.

When the physical wired adapter gets disconnected, the ZCM agent still finds another wired (virtual) adapter as being connected and so the Communication Hardware policy keeps enforcing that the Wi-Fi adapter should be disabled.

Status

Reported to Engineering

Additional Information

The nvspbind tool as available at Microsoft might be helpful in automating to disable the network adapter binding.