Set Priority of NICs/WNICs in Windows

article #1492, updated 663 days ago

So we have the situation where we have multiple network interfaces, possibly including wireless, and we want to set priority, so if one is connected, that one will be used. Here’s a good working procedure, all in Powershell.

  1. Get list of interfaces with the Windows index number for each:
Get-NetIPInterface | ft ifINdex,InterfaceAlias,AddressFamily

Now we have a list of interfaces and names. Each interface device may have two listings, one for IPv6 and one for IPv4. What we want is the index numbers for the two. On one machine, “Ethernet” was index 12, and “Wifi” was 18, but there will be wide variation.

  1. Priority is higher, for lower numbers. So if we want to set high priority for wired Ethernet when it’s present, we could set priority 10:
Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceIndex "12" -InterfaceMetric "10"
  1. and to make it stick and work predictably, we set Wifi to priority 100:
Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceIndex "18" -InterfaceMetric "100"

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