How to route traffic to one specific NIC when two are installed

Question

I have a PC with 2 NICs installed and I want to utilize both, in my office table there's a 2 port patch panel.

1 port is for internet, and the other for internal access.

When both my NICs are active, it seems that I cannot access both network simultaneously (internal & internet).

My PC is in the state of confusion as to what traffic goes to a certain NIC only, by that I mean if I search the internet it should use the nic internet port if I access internal network it must use the office NIC port.

Is there a way I can command in windows to do routing of packets?

Solution 1

Windows does not support multi-homed networks when the networks are disjointed. See this kb for more details.

If your 10.0.0.0/24 network has all of the devices inside the same subnet all you need to do is not set a default gateway for that nic and everything should work. If you do need to set a default gateway on your 10.0.0.0/24 network, you can't do it, windows does not support multiple gateways.

Solution 2

How about selecting both network adapters in the

Control Panel/Network and Internet/Network Connections

and then right click and select Bridge Connections. From what I understand of networking, this may allow you to access both networks, and if I understand it correctly, the newly formed network bridge would then route traffic between the two networks, depending on the requested information.

I attempted to use this method to gain greater internet access, splitting data traffic between the two adapters, essentially doubling my rate, but only the first adapter was using the internet connectivity, the second one that connected was not being used. This may be due to the fact that the first one was able to fulfill the request, so the bridge used that one. Google research corrected me on this, thus me finding your question as well.

Comments

[tink]

Would you consider telling us the OS you're using?

[user1933824]

im using windows 7, the reason behind this, its too troublesome to disconnect a cable and switch it to another port just to change my access to a certain network. the internal network (10.0.0.0/24) and my internet network goes (192.168.X.X/24) these are 2 separate networks, and i just need to make all my web traffics go the (192.168.X.X) gateway

[Scott Chamberlain]

being 10.0.0.0/24 are there any computers on the internal network on 10.0.1.0 or above? Also is the 192.168.X.X/24 network really /24 or did you mean to type /16?

[Scott Chamberlain]

Ok, my question is are there any computers on your corperate network outside of the 10.132.232.X range? If the answer to my question is "Yes" then the answer to your question is "Windows does not support that setup, you can't have gateways for two NICs that point to two networks, only two NICs to one network or two NICs to two networks where one does not have a gateway router set."

[Richard Chambers]

See also this similar question superuser.com/questions/96608/…