“No network adapters could be identified” error when choosing a network template in TMG
Introduction
Some of our customers have experienced the problem described below when doing the initial network configuration of a fresh TMG installation. I wanted to share here the cause and solution to this issue.
Consider the following scenario
You have installed Forefront TMG 2010, but when running the Getting Started wizard, you get the error “No network adapters could be identified. The wizard cannot continue” when choosing the Network Template, see screenshot below:
Cause
We’ve seen this issue on servers where Operating System hardening has been applied prior to TMG installation. As a result, some services required by TMG to operate properly have been wrongly disabled causing the problem described above.
Solution
The solution and only supported way to perform hardening of a TMG machine is to execute the Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) tool and use the TMG security configuration template (XML file) matching your deployment in order to harden properly the server.
Note: By default, the SCW does not include support for the TMG 2010 role nor TMG Enterprise Management Server (EMS) role. To support these roles, download and install TMGRolesForSCW.exe included in the TMG 2010 Tools and Software Development Kit (SDK), available here .
Author
Eric Detoc
Escalation Engineer - Microsoft CSS Forefront Security Edge Team
Technical Reviewer
Franck Heilmann
Escalation Engineer - Microsoft CSS Forefront Security Edge Team
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Hi Eric, to add to the above, I just learnt that you'll get the same error message if you have too many IP addresses configured on a NIC. A helpful sysop added 255 IP addresses on different subnets to a server (on the same NIC) I was supposed to install TMG on. Removed all IP addresses but one and it worked. Didn't try to find out what the maximum number of addresses are.Anonymous
December 27, 2010
Hi Eric, Interesting blog. I want to add I found another way to solve this issue. When you remove (all) the network interfaces through Device Manager and let then detect once again, the problem is solved as well. I encountered this issue only when I re-installed the Operating Systems and Threat Management Gateway for the third time. In my case because I noticed the network interfaces where detected in a different order when you compare them between two exactly the same servers. I have changed that so the order and output matched. But then this issue occurred. Hope this information is useful.Anonymous
December 27, 2010
Hi Eric, And again I would like to add something. Today I noticed another thing. If you have configured the network interfaces and TMG cannot find a network interface, you might have made a mistake on the configuration of one of the network interfaces. For example, when you configure the right IP Address and subnet mask for your external interface, but your configure the deftault gateway with a subnet address or broadcast address then TMG won't see any interfaces. For example. Suppose you have a public subnet nnn.nnn.nnn.192/27, then you have a IP range from nnn.nnn.nnn.192-223. The IP Address nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn.192 is the subnet address/ID and the IP Address nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn.223 is the broadcast address. suppose you configured it like this... IP Address: nnn.nnn.nnn.201 Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.224 Deftault Gateway: nnn.nnn.nnn.192 In this case TMG will not find any network interfaces at all. Change the default gateway to .193 and the problem is solved...Anonymous
February 02, 2011
Hello all. I found this topic looking for solution of same problem, but cause of mine was quite different. Prior to Windows 2008 R2 server installation I've disabled 2 unused server NICs in server bios settings. I'didn't noticed, that they anyway appeared on windows devices list after installation, with prompt "not enought resources to run". They should never been there (as disabled on bios system level). My solution was to uninstall unused devices, they didn't appeared again. Problem disappeared without server restarting, but I've spent 4h unproductive workarounds before that :(. So remember to look for old good and forgotten hardware and irq issues solving problems with newest software ;). Server was HP 360 and NICs 2 port gigabit intels as I remember. Regards, hope it will be helpful...Anonymous
February 02, 2011
Errata. NICs showed again after second restart of the server and problem was back. It's curious, shows that with HP servers bios disabled PCI devices are still visible in W2k8 system but cannot work without needed (bios level allocated) resources... When disabled on Windows device list everything in TMG works fine again. Will remove them next time visiting server room...Anonymous
March 10, 2011
Well i am a bit new to all this but learning as we speak... i get this i wish their be a nice step by step on how to set this all up and stuff and how to setup your server.... i am having trouble here i can't even do a single network i don't know what i done wrong i just want this to get this up and going i mainly got TMG 2010 for protection and now its sort of useless :(Anonymous
April 03, 2012
Good day, I'm trying to install Forefront on windows server 2008 R2 sp1. TMGRolesForSCW.exe does not provide xml file for that system. Is there any way to get one?Anonymous
August 04, 2012
I have the same problem where i have tried installing TMG 2010 on a VMWARE machine, and what happened is that TMG didnt see the network cards installed, i have tried many changes concerning the network configurations in VMWARE 8 but it was useless, note that these configurations where successfuly working when i installed ISA. Note that i dont think the problem is in TMG cause when i installed the software directly (with out virtualization) every thing worked great. any ideas that could help??Anonymous
October 15, 2012
Two steps to follow to solve this problem: 1- Just delete the old file Microsoft Forefront TMG Tools in Program Files (x86) 2- Reinstall TMGRolesForSCW.exe ThanksAnonymous
October 23, 2013
None of the previous solutions worked for me. I've done a repair of TMG and I could saw my network adapters again...