Here’s a little WMI script I threw together the other day to help someone out. The requirement was to set the display name (label) of a network adapter based on its hardware location.
Let’s say we have a NIC with the display name “Local Area Connection” and you want to change it to “MyNIC”, but only if it has a specific hardware location (e.g. PCI bus 3, device 0, function 0). Of course, you can do this manually by nipping into the network connection properties (ncpa.cpl), but what if you have tens or hundreds of servers that you want to do this for?
#########################################################
#
# Name: SetNetConnectionID.ps1
# Author: Tony Murray
# Version: 1.0
# Date: 20/04/2011
# Comment: PowerShell script to
# change device display name for network adapter based
# on hardware location
#
#########################################################
$newname = "MyNIC"
$location = "PCI bus 3, device 0, function 0"
$drvinfo = (Get-WMIObject Win32_PnPSignedDriver `
| ?{$_.Location -eq $location}).DeviceID
$nic = Get-WMIObject Win32_NetworkAdapter `
| ?{$_.PNPDeviceID -eq $drvinfo}
$oldname = $nic.NetConnectionID
write-host "Network Adapter name before change: " $oldname
$nic.NetConnectionID = $newname
$nic.Put()
After running the script, you should see that the display name has changed.
My script only changes the NIC display name for the computer on which it is running, but you could easily change this to run against multiple machines.