Feature request: Explicitly exclude virtual adapters (e.g. CloudflareWARP)

[SeriousConcept1134]

Hi,

My personal setup involves a Wi-Fi connection (main), and a backup LTE (cellular) connection.
Mostly I'm connected using the Wi-Fi with the LTE connection on standby. If Wi-Fi is down then the LTE connection takes over.

However the problem as it relates to the "Network Meter Pro" gadget starts when I establish a Cloudflare WARP connection:

• Without the WARP connection the gadget correctly displays the active adapter, either Wi-Fi or LTE.
• However once WARP is connected, the gadget shows the WARP virtual adapter ("Cloudflare WARP Interface Tunnel"), instead of the physical adapter backend that's being used.

Would it be possible to implement a feature that would allow the user to explicitly exclude any virtual adapters from showing up in the gadget?

This way, even if the traffic is routing through a virtual adapter (WARP, VPN), the gadget will still show only the underlying physical adapter that's in use.

Thank you!

[SilverAzide]

Hello! Great question. A while back I had the same setup as you, so I know exactly what you are asking about.

I specifically wrote the Network Meter to exclude virtual adapters for the very reason you describe. This is why the configuration explicitly asks for your physical adapters. So I did want to point out that the activity you see (the up/down traffic and graph) is only showing physical adapter activity, assuming that's the way you have things configured.

However, the 2 lines in the orange color where it shows your network and adapter name, those are coming from Rainmeter (i.e., Windows) as what it thinks are your "active" network and adapter. This is where it shows your VPN when that is active, and is the source of your problem.

The bad news is that there is no way in Windows (that I have ever found) that will reveal the underlying physical adapter for a VPN. Apparently this is trivial in MacOS/Linux, but not in Windows.

The way I handled this was to use two Network Meters; i.e., make a copy, similar to the info here but not for the purpose of monitoring a VPN. You would configure one Network Meter to only look at your WiFi/Ethernet/whatever connections, and configure the other to only look at your cellular/broadband connection. Then, whichever one shows activity regardless of the name of the active adapter, is the "real" one.

Ok, so that is a kind of lame hack, but lame hacks are pretty much the only option we have.

But the good news is that I think it is possible to figure this out in a more clever way. The trick is that since your VPN virtual adapter is simply passing the same traffic through it as one of your physical adapters, you could add a set of measures to "watch" your VPN virtual adapter. If your VPN is showing non-zero throughput, then you can compare its traffic to the physical adapters in your machine, and whichever physical adapter matches (or most closely matches) your virtual adapter, that is the real one that is active.

I may be able to cobble together some code you could try to see if it works, unless you want to try it yourself. Let me know what you think.