Internet sharing multiple adapters with the same names

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Internet sharing multiple adapters with the same names

When I want to share my internet connection (Wifi or usb/lightning) I am presented with a perplexing choice of network adapters in picker, some of them are duplicated, which makes it harder than necessary to guess which adapter is which?

I only have a cat5 adapter on the mac mini M1, so I'm not really understanding where the (en4) and (en5) adapters are bound to or why they are duplicated here, are these virtualbox or virtual adapters? Should I just ignore them? The help documentation completely omits this bit, so I'm ignoring them? Basically I normally chose to share the VNP or the ethernet, but sometimes, I just get no or limited connectivity at the tethered device, and have to reboot the mac or something to get joy. Have had to redo this far too many times to continue guessing. I'm missing some basics I suspect. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/332191/surprisingly-many-network-interfaces-on-macos-are-these-legitimate is not really helping in this context or correlating with what I'm seeing in the screenshot.

Posted on Sep 14, 2022 6:41 AM

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Answer 1

conradbraam Author

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Oct 3, 2022 1:05 AM in response to conradbraam

Turn out that my original question https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254088666? which never really got a correct answer in the end, although the system does not let me edit a question that is 3 months old now. So unable to correct things. This is why it works but only randomly. This is all very hard to troubleshoot and the adapter names being identical was merely a red herring. There is no fix.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/125372/internet-sharing-handing-out-wrong-dns-server-address

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Answer 2

conradbraam Author

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Sep 14, 2022 9:08 AM in response to conradbraam

So.

I'm still no wizer on why I have so many nics. But

turn off internet sharing
unplug all phones/wifi off, then plug in
turn on internet sharing again

You have to do this patiently and quite slowly for some reason.

It seems that upgrading the ipad to ios16 created some issues and the ipad (8th gen) become randomly non responsive until I rebooted it. That meant that internet was not working in some apps somehow. Which turned out to be a real struggle in the end somehow to reboot, but seems to resolve. Still no idea why I see some networks cards twice here?

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Internet sharing multiple adapters with the same names

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