Windows system-tray icon status shows"Disabled" on some of my PCs
While on most of my Windows PCs' system-tray icons status show "Enabled" - some of them refuse to be enabled.
My attempts to enable NextDNS appear (on the problematic instances), appear to go nowhere. I.e. their system-tray icons status remain "Disabled".
Your thoughts?
4 replies
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There’s several hostnames that Microsoft uses to determine whether a Windows os is connected to the internet. Sadly, they’ve used different names depending on which version of Windows you’re using. They list them in some of their knowledge base documents. In the past, I’ve provided links to those documents so you might find them by searching this community but it’s probably better to search Microsoft’s support documents because they may change from time to time. I stopped using Windows after 7 and haven’t kept up with what they’re doing with 10 and 11.
anyway, you’d need to add the proper hostnames to your allow list or figure out which blocklists are blocking the hostnames Microsoft uses.
I believe there’s also a registry setting that can be modified to adjust the behavior of how Windows determines whether or not it’s connected to the internet, but that may have changed too since the last time I used Windows
yet another option is to merely live with it, assuming it doesn’t prevent the os from working properly.
Windows is such a tangled mess of code, it’s difficult to know the ramifications of doing some of the workarounds. Even worse, with every security update they publish there’s always unintended consequences so whatever fix you do today might cause some other problem to crop up in the future (one of the many reasons I gave up using Windows)
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Thanks Calvin,
I also moved onto a MacBook in 2017, but there's just no way to dance around the Windows PCs which I have to keep on telling they are in fact good boys, even though they clearly "poop inside" the house.
My concern is not that Windows actually disconnects, but rather with the NextDNS system-tray icon. I noticed that restarting a PC seems to resolve the issue I mentioned, so it may not even be critical... I also confirmed that those sites on the Denylist were indeed unreachable, so it further seems like the "disconnection" may not effect the stable operation of NextDNS, after all.
I am curious to know if this is something to be concerned about, and I also wonder (now) how long it will be before someone figures out to right-click on the system-tray icon and disable NextDNS. I tested it for myself, and while I had it "disabled", I could indeed visit the sites on the Denylist.
Maybe one can hide the system-tray icon to prevent that sort of fiddling?
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Anybody figured out how to hide the tray icon? Maybe it can be run as a service somehow? Or is there a CLI option
Content aside
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