Back Online: finally
Things have been clumsy for me on email and the blogs over the last week, because I’ve had some extremely inconvenient connectivity problems. Ever since I spent a night in Copenhagen, I’ve not been able to connect to any wireless network except for corpnet in Redmond. Every network says it has been blocked:
I’ve spent time on several different days playing around with this, both on my own and with the enthusiastic assistance of various long-suffering phone support types. I’ve logged in as local admin, I’ve deleted and re-installed my network adapter and other things, I’ve played around with Windows Defender, and nothing made any difference. I’ve done lots of searches on the net (while at work, sigh) and found that others have had this problem although I never found a solution mentioned.
But today, with some great help from my new favorite Windows guys Kalmesh and Wai, I’m back online. And here’s how I did it, for my own future reference and for others who might want it too …
First off, this is all stuff you have to do at a command prompt running as administrator. If you don’t know exactly what that means and how to get there, you shouldn’t be doing this stuff.
When the problem shown above is happening, type the command netsh wlan show filter and you should get something like this:
Allow list on the system (group policy)
—————————————
SSID: “A-MSFTWLAN”, Type: Infrastructure
SSID: “MSFTWLAN”, Type: Infrastructure
Allow list on the system (user)
——————————-
SSID: “MOBILE-EAPSIM”, Type: Infrastructure
Block list on the system (group policy)
—————————————
SSID: “A-MSFTWLAN”, Type: Adhoc
SSID: “MSFTWLAN”, Type: Adhoc
SSID: “MSFTGUEST”, Type: Adhoc
Block list on the system (user)
——————————-
SSID: “”, Type: Infrastructure
SSID: “”, Type: Adhoc
That last bit about “Block list on the system (user)” is the problem. It says that ALL networks should be blocked. Somehow this setting changed while I was in Copenhagen a week ago. I have no clue how or why, but in the future I think I’ll stop giving my password to young hotel employees until I get to know them much better. (LCA: that was a joke.)
Anyway, the solution is very simple. You just type these two commands, at that same administrator command prompt, and suddenly all the wireless networks are un-blocked:
netsh wlan delete filter permission=denyall networktype=adhoc
netsh wlan delete filter permission=denyall networktype= Infrastructure
I’m online, getting caught up on important details like this blog post, and feeling more productive than I have since Geneva. If you’ve emailed me in the last two weeks and are still waiting on a reply, the chances of that happening have gone way up!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:28 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on March 11, 2008 at 9:50 pm Megan wrote:
I’ve finally got the wireless card working on my Vista laptop, too. Now we need to get it set on yours.
on March 12, 2008 at 6:24 am AUNT MARSHA wrote:
Is Vista what you had at Isle of Palms, Meg?
Wow, Doug (h), reading that blocked and re-admin’d entry gave me chills. Though I have never been to Copenhagen, I experienced something sooo similar after a trip to CA last year—offline for what felt like forever. Can’t remember exactly how I got back on…Jamal may have taken remote control. No, I would have had to log on and give him that. Don’t know–just remember what a horrific nightmare it was and how lost and violated and deprived I felt during the time I was not allowed access, which seemed endless and forever-esque.
I am not, btw, one of the ones who should ever BE the administrator of my own cyber senses and such. Well, you’ve seen me in action–you know the dangers.
Took the gran to your house yesterday. She was asking me things like, “Is this picture taken from the living room or the kitchen?” Um, let’s see….THE LAST TIME I WAS THERE, AT THE HOUSE THEY DON’T LIVE IN YET…which I, like you, have never seen other than these pictures…Also showed her Meg’s quilt, the cats, etc.
She loved it. We both agree that it has a great deal of charm and dignity and some slight hauntings of Essex St.
love, love,
the aunt (LOVE the new cover pics for the blog—very cool! Was getting weary of that duck, beautiful though he was)
on March 12, 2008 at 6:37 am Doug wrote:
Hi Marsha. Yes, I had forgotten about the duck, and when I saw him when I get back online, he had to go.
I’m going to handle some email before going to work. Just because I can.
on March 12, 2008 at 7:23 am Tom wrote:
Thanks for posting how you got back online — my dad is having some interesting random fun with Vista losing sight of the outside world (while my mom’s computer, six inches away and plugged in to the same router) is still skipping gaily about in the Internets. So I’ll give this a shot next time and see what’s what — I wonder if Vista gets scared of packets it doesn’t recognize and tries to protect itself or something (might explain why a hotel network would have borked you, particularly if there was some less-than-savory hacker type in the hotel sniffing around on the network).
on March 12, 2008 at 11:30 am Doug wrote:
> some less-than-savory hacker type in the hotel sniffing around on the network
Damn, it’s me!