Always On VPN Device Tunnel Status Indicator

Richard M. Hicks

4 years ago

I’ve written many articles about the Windows 10 Always On VPN device tunnel over the years. If you are not familiar with the device tunnel, it is an optional configuration that provides pre-logon connectivity for domain-joined, Enterprise edition Windows 10 clients. Although the device tunnel was designed to supplement the user tunnel connection, some administrators have deployed the device tunnel exclusively and use it for general on-premises network access. While I do not typically recommend this configuration for a variety of reasons, there are some use cases for which using the device tunnel might be acceptable.

Device Tunnel Status

For those administrators who have decided to deploy the device tunnel exclusively, a common complaint is that the device tunnel connection status does not appear in the Windows 10 notification area like other network or user tunnel connections.

However, the device tunnel does appear in the classic Network Connections control panel applet (ncpa.cpl).

Enable Device Tunnel Status Indicator

Fortunately, there is a simple workaround that allows for the device tunnel connection status to appear in the Windows 10 notification area. This can be done by setting the following registry value.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Flyout\VPN\ShowDeviceTunnelInUI DWORD = 1

You can set this registry value using Active Directory group policy preferences or locally by running the following PowerShell command.

New-Item -Path ‘HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Flyout\VPN’ -Force
New-ItemProperty -Path ‘HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Flyout\VPN\’ -Name ‘ShowDeviceTunnelInUI’ -PropertyType DWORD -Value 1 -Force

Once this registry value is set, the Always On VPN device tunnel will appear in the notification area long with other network connections.

Caveat

Although the UI will now display the connectivity status of the Always On VPN device tunnel, clicking Disconnect has no effect. This is expected and by design, as the device tunnel is deployed in the context of the system, not the user. Disconnecting the device tunnel must be performed by an administrator using the GUI tool rasphone.exe or the command line tool rasdial.exe.

Blog Post Comments

For the record, several readers of this blog had posted this workaround in the comments of this post. In the past. I declined to approve those comments because initially I did not want to encourage people to deploy the device tunnel standalone. However, recently I have had a change of heart, and decided to publish this information for those administrators who want to use the device tunnel exclusively, and would also benefit from a visual connectivity status indicator for the Windows 10 Always On VPN device tunnel. Although I still do not recommend using the device tunnel alone, I understand that it may be acceptable for others, so I have decided to release that information here.