Disabled network adapters
In case you have problems with disabled network adapters you can find ways how to solve them in the following lines. Most likely you are looking for a solution after seeing this error message:
“There are network adapters on the system that are disabled and MapTiler Engine couldn’t read their hardware properties. Enable the network adapters and MapTiler Engine will be able to remember the adapters even if the adapters are disabled in the future.”
The MapTiler Engine license process needs to read all the components of a computer to get an accurate “fingerprint” of the computer, and that includes all real (non-virtualized) network adapters attached to the computer.
Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 and newer
The MapTiler Engine license process can utilize improvements to the Windows API and Windows Drivers requirements to read network adapters even when they are disabled. So, if your customer is getting “TA_E_ENABLE_NETWORK_ADAPTERS” or “EnableNetworkAdaptersException” on Windows 8 or newer, then the first thing you should do is have them update their network adapter drivers.
Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 and older
The MapTiler Engine license process cannot read network adapters if they have been disabled in the “Network Connections” control panel. There are a few solutions to this customer-inflicted problem:
- Start MapTiler Engine with admin permissions (right-click, click “Run as administrator”). When MapTiler Engine is running in an admin process it has permission to enable/disable network adapters. So MapTiler Engine will temporarily enable any disabled network adapter, read its hardware properties, and then disable it again.
- If you want to handle it manually, then you can open the “Network Connections” control panel, then for any disabled (or greyed-out) adapters, right-click them and click “Enable”. After enabling a network adapter it will no longer be greyed out. Also, note that the adapter doesn’t need to be connected to the Internet, it just needs to be enabled. It doesn’t actually matter whether the adapter is connected to the Internet or not.
Working offline
While it’s best practice to keep network adapters enabled at all times, even if there isn’t an active internet connection. In other words, you can disable the network adapters after MapTiler Engine successfully reads them, and the application will remember them for a while. This way you won’t be prompted to enable the network adapters every time you run the application.
Of course, the solution to never be prompted is to leave the network adapters enabled all of the time. If you are disabling network adapters in an effort to shut the Internet off there are better and more secure ways to do it:
- For ethernet connections unplug the ethernet cable.
- For WiFi connections disconnect from the network, or, if you don’t want the WiFi to talk to any network, switch the WiFi adapter in “Airplane Mode”.