WifiSitter Troubleshooting

Adapter Whitelisting


Taken from the README.md (Program Files\WifiSitter\README.md)
Configuration
There isn't much to configure in WifiSitter but there is one tunable to configure, there may be some network adapters you want ignored complete, Microsoft WiFi Direct for example. Network adapters are named "Ethernet" or "WiFi", names are too generic so the whitelist is made up of the network adapter descriptions. They are string values located at:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\WifiSitter\NicWhiteList

Value names are ignored entirely, they are only used to reference the values and can be anything, incrementing numbers are used by default. Regular expressions were overkill for my needs so matching is done by a case-insensitive .StartsWith(). Note, these values are removed when uninstalling.

 

One of the first things to check if wifi won’t connect is whether or not there are any virtual Ethernet cards that aren’t listed in the whitelist. The registry values only need to match the beginning of the adapter names so: “VMware Network Adapter”, will match: “VMware Network Adapter VMnet1” and “VMware Network Adapter VMnet8”. By default, WifiSitter ships with two exclusions:

Microsoft Wi-Fi Direct
VirtualBox Host

 

VMWare adapters not being ignored by default is an oversight on my part, I didn’t run into these during testing. The exclusions that shipped by default were hard coded into the application, I’ve made some changes and in the future, the installer will bundle a reg file with any additional exclusions that become necessary. Here’s what’s in there right now:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WifiSitter\NicWhiteList]
"0"="Microsoft Wi-Fi Direct"
"1"="VirtualBox Host"
"2"="VMware Network Adapter"

If you come across a machine that doesn’t have those values in the whitelist, they can be copied into a .reg file and imported into the computer’s registry.

 

Troubleshooting Steps

  1. Open: Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections so you can observe changes to the network adapters as they happen.
  2. Check that the WifiSitter service is running, the quickest way is through the “Services” tab from within Task Manager.
  3. Attempt to connect to a wifi access point; if this fails, disable the WifiSitter service and try again.
  4. If it now succeeds, that would indicate that WifiSitter is detecting a connected wired Ethernet adapter and is disabling the offending wifi adapter as soon as the connection is made. Network connection status is more visible through the netsh command (the Network Connections window may fail to correctly indicate connection status).
  5. Disabled the wifi adapter and run netsh interface show interface and note any “connected” network adapters.
  6. If there is a connected Ethernet adapter, copy its name from the “Interface Name” column and add it to the WifiSitter whitelist.
  7. Once that’s complete, start the service, re-enable the WiFi nic and resume troubleshooting at step 3.