Re: Interface names on Windows

[Guy Harris <guy () alum mit edu>]

On Oct 28, 2012, at 3:25 PM, Graham Bloice <graham.bloice () trihedral com> wrote:

> There is also a fourth possible component; the "friendly" name assigned to the interface in the Control Panel 
> "Network Connections" applet.  This is held in the registry and is easily retrieved given the interface "guid" and a 
> few lines of code.

        https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6645

I infer from what's at the end of comment 14:

        https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6645#c14

that it's a work in progress and that he doesn't yet have a patch ready to review or apply.

> Personally I don't find the interface "guid" or the interface description (often just "Microsoft") of much use,

The GUID is completely opaque.  NetMon 3 doesn't appear to show it (except in a "Reusable ISATAP Interface" on my W7 
virtual machine, but maybe that's part of the "friendly name").

As for "Microsoft":

        http://www.winpcap.org/pipermail/winpcap-bugs/2010-November/001304.html

"It's a known issue with the networking stack on Vista/Win7.

Native wifi adapters on Vista/Win7 have an Intermediate driver (from MS) between their miniport driver and winpcap 
itself, and such IM driver traps the request that WinPcap uses to get the name, returning just "Microsoft"."

so that's ultimately an issue that might have to be resolved in WinPcap - Network Monitor appears to be able to get the 
right device name; apparently its driver is, on NDIS 6 systems such as Vista and later, a "lightweight filter" driver, 
which might mean it can get at the underlying driver's vendor description, or perhaps it uses some other non-NDIS 
mechanism to get at the underlying driver's vendor description.

> and the other two components are somewhat mutually exclusive as they can both be set by the user and hence likely to 
> be similar.

The user description is for use on systems where you *don't* have a user-settable friendly name (either because there 
is no friendly name, there is one but it's not settable, or there is one but you don't have permission to set it).
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