Faking Internet Connectivity for your Lab (Tricking NCSI)

Sometimes, you’d do anything to keep your connection icons tidy!

Chad (from the Canberra PFE team) and I gave a talk on the new simplified DirectAccess at TechEd 2012 Australia, and we really wanted our demos to look good.

Part of that was trying to convince the audience that network connectivity was OK, despite us being on several non-Internet-connected virtual machine networks – essentially, we wanted to simulate a convincing public Internet!

Chad put in the hard yards, and came up with the solution:

Sometimes in your lab you might need your network connection status indicator (NCSI) to say you are on the Internet, even though you are not. The scenario I've been hitting a lot is when I am messing about with Direct Access in a lab, often the DA status indicator wont change to 'connected', even though DA is working. It's because the client doesn't think it is on the Internet. This post is to help you work around that issue in your lab environments.

The full description of how it can be configured to work is over at his post, Fake Internet Connectivity For Your Lab.

Posted by Tristan Kington , MSPFE Editor sans dachsund