Re: PSA: Simple Wi-Fi gateway killswitch that works with OpenVPN config files

Carlos E. R. wrote:
> Said with a smile.

The good news is we learned a ton about Windows during this debugging task.

What we learned is not trivial tinkering. It's a practical crash-course in
how Windows networking actually works in 2026, not how people assume it
works	.

For example, Andy rightly noticed that WMIC is deprecated, so all the
scripts with WMIC need to be changed eventually to use other methods.

We learned that modern Wi-Fi NICs auto-repair the default route and even
that OpenVPN servers determine the gateway and then re-inject it back such
that the lesson is nodern NICs behave like autonomous network devices, not
passive pipes and VPN routing behavior is not just "server pushes, client
obeys." We learned that the hardware and OS metadata influence the client.

We learned metrics are part of Windows' security posture where
misconfigured metrics can cause privacy leaks.

If we didn't already know about batch elevation sans UAC prompt, we would
have learned Windows security boundaries shape how automation must be
designed.

This project wasn't just about toggling a gateway. It was about discovering
how modern Windows networking actually behaves, which is very different
from how it behaved even a few years ago.

I had to learn:
 a. how modern NICs auto-repair routes
 b. how Windows auto-metric affects VPN routing
 c. why WMIC is deprecated and unreliable
 d. how VPN clients interact with OS routing
 e. how Windows security boundaries affect automation

Each of these behaviors broke the earlier versions of the killswitch, so I
had to understand them deeply to build something stable.

The time spent wasn't "just scripting." It was diagnosing and adapting to
the real, modern Windows networking stack, which is knowledge that is
essential for secure VPN use, routing control, and system automation.

I'm still digging into how Aloha is affected by this killswitch, given
Aloha is the fastest VPN browser on earth, but also the most dangerous.	 
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