Ethernet & Wireless Adapters Both Active?

[ringfinger]

Is it possible to have wireless and LAN adapters both active and processing information across different neworks?

Here's the situation I came across today...

I was hooking up an internet cafe for a group we had in house at our exhibit hall. They had 8 IBM PC's and 4 printers. The IBM machines were jacked into our network through 802.11g PCI wireless cards and were online and surfing fine. The 4 different printers I hooked into 3 different switches which varied in location. I then hooked the PC's into the appropriate switches in locale to the right printer though the ethernet card. I set static IP's on the printers and set the gateways. I then set static IP's on the computers on the same network as the printers. They all printed fine, no probs at all. I just couldn't get on the net...

My problem came when trying to surf the net. I couldn't ping the wireless gateway nor the public DNS servers when the LAN card was enabled. So, at this point, I have printing due to the satatically set IP's on the machines and corresponding printers... but couldn't go anywhere on the net. It's like IE says "Oh, hey... I have a NIC card which is active, I'm going to try and connect through it.." but, the wireless was the connection with the DNS and Internet capabilities. So, long story short, I ended up cabling the whole cafe, printers and all so they'd all be on the same network and Vlan. At which point I disabled the wireless cards and they were all able to both print and surf fine.

I have tried bridging the connections and ICS.

So, is there a way to have both interfaces online and talking on different networks? My netowrk engineers tell me no....

Any help or suggestions are welcome.

[RogueSpear]

I do this everyday with my laptop at work. Wired is to the work network and 802.11g to a seperate private network with a seperate internet connection. When I first set this up a few years back it took a little tweaking with the route command, but it works flawless. Also, some of the better utilities out there will allow you to specify what interface should be the preferred interface like BitWise, uTorrent, Hamachi, and I'm sure several others that I'm forgetting.

I'm using DHCP on the corp side, and have everything static on the private side, but there wouldn't be anything to prevent me from using DHCP on both interfaces.

[ringfinger]

I did a route /? in cmd line, didn't know it existed. I'm used to Cisco switches, not Windowz . Can you give me an example of static routes for a 10.42.0.1/24 LAN network and a 192.0.0.1/24 wireless?

[ringfinger]

I guess my real question is.... how can I set a static route with the LAN adapter to only talk with the specified printers and have the wireless adapter only be used for the internet????

[RogueSpear]

Network A - preferred internet connection

192.168.1.10

255.255.255.0

192.168.1.1

Network B - corporate or other private network

172.18.1.10

255.255.0.0

172.18.1.1

If you want to ensure that your internet traffic is utilizing your 192 interface, drop to a command prompt and enter the following:

route add -p 0.0.0.0 MASK 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 METRIC 1

This is very similar to what I have going on at work. Another issue that I have is that there are some web sites that I must access which must go through the corporate internet connection because the web site will only accept incoming connections from my company's IP address. So to make sure that they do not use my preferred internet connection, but rather use the corp connection you enter the following:

route add -p 10.10.10.10 MASK 255.0.0.0 172.18.1.1 METRIC 1

Note that the -p makes your route entry persistent and it will stick even after a reboot.

I've had to do similar configurations with my PIX firewall since it has five seperate interfaces. Things can get a little bit confusing after a while if you don't keep documentation on your config, so make sure you notate all of this stuff as you go along.

[ringfinger]

Interesting.... thanks for the info.

[gamehead200]

Just came across this and not quite sure how to proceed in my situation...

Network Adapter A - ALL INTERNET TRAFFIC

IP: 192.168.50.100

Mask: 255.255.255.0

Gateway: 192.168.50.1

Network Adapter B - INTERNAL NETWORK

IP: 129.97.233.x

Mask: 255.255.255.0

Gateway: 129.97.233.1

I'd like to set up my routing table to allow all internet traffic (except for 129.97.x.x IPs) to pass through network adapter A and for all traffic that resolves to 129.97.x.x IPs to pass through network adapter B.

As I said, I'm really not quite sure how to proceed.