3G cards and iPass

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Recently came up against a brick wall when rolling out 120 or so laptops to our users.  This monster issue came in the guise of the failing 3G cards within our Dell laptops.

We saw that after a build of Windows 7 the cards functioned fine and were able to connect to the local provider after configuring.

When we came to do our final checks we noticed that some of the laptops had failed 3G connections.  This failure was not laptop model based (we had two models both of which randomly showed the 3G failure)

Since the only thing between build and the check was some Windows patches we surmised that one or more patches were the issue.  There were 85 patches.  This took a while.  It turns out that even after removing all the patches the 3G card refused to function correctly.

More investigation turned up that the WWAN service was disabled.  Enabling and starting this service sorted out the problem.  Hoorah.

Not quite. After a while some laptops showed that the service was disabled again.

Grrrrr.

So working on we found that the iPass client, if it starts before the WWAN service stops and disables it.  We created a config file to get round this and bingo back in business.

Hope it helps someone.

The file needs to be put in the following folders on the laptop...

C:\Program Files\iPass\iPassConnect

and

C:\Program Files\iPass\iPassConnect\backup

Here's the file, call it conflictApp.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
- <cfdb:ConflictAppDB xmlns:cfdb="http://www.ipass.com/ns/cfdb" version="1.0">
- <!-- 
 Set Service StartMode

 NOSTARTMODE =0,
 BOOT = 1,
 SYSTEM = 2,
 AUTO = 3,
 MANUAL = 4,
 DISABLED =5
  -->
- <!-- 
  Set Service State

 NOACTION = 0,
 START_SERVICE = 1,
 STOP_SERVICE = 2,
 PAUSE_SERVICE = 3,
 RESUME_SERVICE = 4
  -->
<!-- 
  Set Restore="1" if service StartMode and State need to be restore back on iPC shutdown
  -->
<!-- 
Disabling the WWAN AutoConfig service to avoid conflict for device integrations on Win7
  -->
  <cfdb:App desc="WWAN AutoConfig on Win7" StartMode="3" SvcState="0" Restore="1" type="svc">WwanSvc</cfdb:App>
<!-- 
End of conflict for device integrations on Win7
  -->
  </cfdb:ConflictAppDB>


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