Workaround: Road Warrior Long logon / logoff times / Guest WIFI portal missing – What is causing them and a quick work around

By shauncassells in Travel, Windows Insider on
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I travel for work… a lot.  Which means I am connecting to a lot of WIFI networks.  Yes, I know security issues but hey I have to get work done no matter where I am.

Issue: Long logon / Logoff and Guest WIFI redirects failing

Recently, I was experiencing extraordinarily long Logon and Logoff times.  It was highly infuriating and I didn’t have a clue what was causing it.  A little digging gave me a method to see what was taking so long.  This also led me to why I couldn’t connect to wifi gateways for guest logon.

Enable Verbose Logon Status Messages

To use enable verbose status messages by editing the registry, follow these steps:

  1. Click Start, and then click Run.
  2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.
  3. Locate and then click the following registry key: 
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
  4. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
  5. Type verbosestatus, and then press ENTER.
  6. Double-click the new key that you created, type
    1 in the Value data box, and then click
    OK.
  7. Quit Registry Editor.

Note Windows does not display status messages if the following key is present and the value is set to 1:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DisableStatusMessages
With this enabled I noticed I was having a long time with network configurations as it was running through the entire network stack history.

Solution?

The easiest method to clear the history is to run the following command line:
NBTStat -R
Note: -R is capitalized
-R (Reload) Purges and reloads the remote cache name table
Why just clear out the stack versus figure out the sort order?  Well, mainly for expediency.  Every time I connect to a network I only care about the network I am connecting to at that moment.  As the initial logon process works well… but reconnecting to a history network didn’t…
tb7ktx6

Side Effects

During the 1803 upgrade I noticed a new user logon status message I hadn’t seen before: Waiting for Workplace Connectivity.  More research coming…
2018-04-30 17.50.12

Published by shauncassells

Shaun Cassells, Senior Solutions Engineer, 1E Shaun is a Microsoft MVP Windows Insider MVP and executive at Central Texas Systems Management User Group (CTSMUG). Shaun is a frequent speaker at conferences like MMS, Gartner, TechEd Europe, TechEd North America, IT Dev Connections, System Center Rallies, and Systems Management User Groups (SMUGs). Shaun is an award winning blogger syndicated from www.shauncassells.com. Shaun specializes in analysis, optimization, and design of Tactical Solutions to Strategic Business Goals. Prior to joining 1E in 2010, he worked for a Global 100 company as the Configuration Manager Service Owner and Architect. Recently as a Principle Consultant at 1E, he accomplished design, review, and improvements to a variety of Configuration Manager environments from the very small to sites with a half million seats. He provided leadership that created a patented automated application rationalization and usage based OSD mapping solution in use by multiple fortune 500 companies. These days you can find Shaun traveling to help discover, review, and improve business productivity across the world.

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