Internet & Network - seperately.

[Rastalovich]

I`ve asked this question so many times, and searched for it, that I`m quite oblivious as why no1 seems to know why this happens or more importantly what to do about it.

I`ll try a slow walk through a scenario, just so as every1 can appreciate what goes on here.

Take the following pieces of kit:

• PCs with 2x gig nics
  
• Internet/Router, with 10/100 switching (4ports)
  
• Ethernet switch 1G (6 ports)

Commonly, the 1G switch has a cat5 connected to the router, giving the 1G network an internet connection and thus everything connected to the 1G switch gets both 1G networking and internet - fair enough. But there are pros and cons, 1 con being traffic during internet and file transfer. But it does however work fairly well.

Now I put forward that if u have 2x gig nics in the pcs, it should be totally feasible to keep the router and 1G switch seperate, and use 1 gig nic for connection to the router (10/100) and the other to the 1G switch for networking.

Ok, well u connect things how I`ve just explained, and whilst ur in windows and check internet and networking - everything works great.

Restart the machine(s), and windows will want to do the internet and networking off the 10/100 - and use the 1G connection for nothing.

Spent quite a bit of time pulling hair out and testing this, and it`s exactly what happens.

So I ask again, how can u maybe force windows to not use the 10/100 for networking and just internet ?

 

[JN]

Do you have a gateway address specified on the NIC's that are connected to your LAN? If so, I'd take that out and only put the gateway (router) IP on the NIC's that are connected into the router directly.

 

[Rastalovich]

DHCP iirc from the last time I tried it, although logically I think I would have assigned IP for the 1G switch.

Thinking about it tho, I`m sure I tried assigning IPs, and it worked, but again when it restarted it fell down.

 

[JN]

DHCP iirc from the last time I tried it, although logically I think I would have assigned IP for the 1G switch.

Thinking about it tho, I`m sure I tried assigning IPs, and it worked, but again when it restarted it fell down.

hmm...on the LAN cards i'd manually assign IP/Subnet/DNS(if needed) and leave everything else blank.

 

[Rastalovich]

Thanks Jim, I`ll be giving it another shot at some point.

The biggest beef is going to be the windows assignment of which nic is going to do what after a restart.

I still think even doing that it`ll work until restart.

 

[JN]

Seems a bit strange to be honest. At one point we had two NIC's in both of our OC3D servers. One of the NICs was used for access to the internet, while the other was simply used with a crossover cable to talk directly to the other server (for ultra-fast backups etc).

For that we had all of the NIC's manually assigned IP's and it worked fine even after reboots.

Hope you can get it going mate

 

[Rastalovich]

Yeah I tried a few close connection things too (now u mention xover), like a firewire for transfering stuff. Same deal after reboot, totally disregards the 400mbps.