Sometimes you will need to test from a Windows environment. To cite merely two examples:
- if you have busted out of a Citrix locked down environment and are now installing tools; or
- if the customer wants you to simulate a rogue internal user with one of their Workstations (I love doing this personally!).
These come up relatively regularly in my life but not day to day. The biggest one is really: you just want to do some work and your host OS is Windows!
In those situations you might miss the friendly and warm embrace of “eth0” and that ilk we have under Linux. If you want to install and run Responder or Wireshark or whatever you will need to know your interface names.
Solution
Rename your adapters to mean something to you! Not complicated. Windows allows you to do this via “Control Panel” -> “Network and Internet” -> “Network Connections:
Pick a name that makes sense to you and be on your merry way. I renamed things to “Ethernet”, “Ethernet 2”, “WiFi” etc so I knew what they were. These names are then persisted within Wireshark when I tested it so it seemed like a good idea to me.
The rest of this blog are just random thoughts on Adapter Creep, and ipconfig rants if you want to stick around that is your choice!
Adapter Creep: How we got here
The number of network adapters has been on the increase in the last decade. You may have:
- Ethernet
- WiFi
- VPN Connections
- Virtualised Interfaces (for VMWare, VirtualBox etc)
I personally find it a pain to read the output of “ipconfig” or sift through the drop downs in tools. This is another reason I decided to start renaming adapters.
Rant about “ipconfig”
The following in your command prompt will display the list of adapter names you currently have:
ipconfig | findstr "adapter"
The usage instructions for “ipconfig” do state that you have a “where” clause which can let you interact with specific interfaces:
Based on attempting this myself many years ago, and on the various Stack Overflow and forum responses I just saw on trying to use that “where”, I am going to conclude that this doesn’t work well enough for anyone.
I had hoped that explicitly setting the name of the adapter would make this easier but somehow “*Ethernet*” does nothing as far as I can see.
Solutions are out there to get what you want with .bat files, or VBS etc. Fairly hacky was to do basic networking tasks.
Netsh seemingly to the rescue
In reading the forum posts I did find a tip about using “netsh” instead of “ipconfig”. While this feels like a much much bigger tool for the job. It is possible to properly query details of specific interfaces only. So sharing the syntax in case it helps:
netsh interface ip show address name="WiFI"
Where the address name is exactly the name of the adapter.
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