No More Hardware Profiles

Supposedly, they got rid of hardware profiles in Windows (maybe from version 8 onward? I don’t know, and I don’t care.)

So now instead of having two profiles I just have two scripts:

#disable internet
route route delete 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 10.0.0.1

#enable internet
route route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 10.0.0.1

...where 10.0.0.1 is the address of the local router

This allows sftp (or Samba if you are a masochist) locally, while disabling Internet.

I hate, hate, hate Samba. I have used it once or twice where nothing else wanted to work. But I hate it as much as the day is long. What do I use, you may be asking? sshfs, sftp, rsync, and other functional tools.

The use case in question is a DAW, where we need to do updates, activations, and downloads on a rare occasion. The rest of the time, it is air-gapped. This improves performance while also protecting the more important hosts on the LAN.

Our original hardware profiles (on XP, if you care) also had many services disabled in the audio profile vs. the non-audio profile, and I have not finished examining how that part is going to work. My offhand guess is that a set of scripts using the 'sc' command, or whatever they have replaced it with, will do the trick.

I used to have  an optimisation script for work purposes, such that it would stop all the useless junk without altering the employer’s lovely configuration (ha ha). Something similar to that ought to work, so long as services are prevented from attempting to start again on their own.

Sometimes the inelegant solution is the best one.