In one of my previous posts, I shared the PowerShell code that helps in enabling or disabling a network connection easily in any operating System. Starting with Windows Server 2012 this has become very easy that you don’t need any additional code to perform this. Windows Server 2012/Windows 8 and above has a bunch of cmdlets that can work with network connections to enable or disable them.
A new module called NetAdapter is introduced to work with network connections. It has total of 64 cmdlets that can be used to perform operations against network connections in Windows Server 2012/Windows 8 or above. In future post, you will see more content about usage of the cmdlets in these modules. In today’s post we will how to enable or disable network connections locally as well as remote.
Get-NetAdapter cmdlet helps in listing the current network connections.
Get-NetAdapter -CimSession TIBDC2
It lists the network adapters and their status on TIBDC2 server. As you can see in the output, there is one network adapter which is in disabled state. If you want to enable that adapter you can use Enable-NetAdapter as shown below.
Enable-NetAdapter -CimSession TIBDC2 -Name Ethernet2
This command will return nothing when completed successfully. You can use -Passthru parameter if you want to see what is the status of the network connection after running the enable command.
Enable-NetAdapter -CimSession TIBDC2 -Name Ethernet2 -PassThru
Disabling a network connection is similar to enable operation. Instead of Enable-NetAdapter, we need to use Disable-NetAdapter cmdlet. The parameters that you need to supply to this cmdlet are same as what you have provided for Enable-Netadapter cmdlet.
Now let us look at below sample command that disables the Ethernet2 adapter that we just enabled.
Disable-NetAdapter -CimSession TIBDC2 -Name Ethernet2
This command will prompt you for a confirmation to disable the connection. You can suppress this by specifying -Confirm:$false to the cmdlet.
Disable-NetAdapter -CimSession TIBDC2 -Name Ethernet2 -Confirm:$false
You can use these sample commands and disable/enable network connections. Hope article helps.