Two Network Cards (NIC’s) in a Windows XP machine connecting to two different subnets
I had a customer recently wanting to setup a new Ricoh multifunction colour printer on their network. The problem is they are connected wirelessly to another tenants network for Internet access and the new printer only has USB and Ethernet connections.
As they had old cabling installed in the wall that terminated back to just a krone frame lying on the floor, I thought we could use the wireless network for their Internet traffic and the wired network for their printer traffic.
I connected all machines up to a small 8 port switch, and set static IP addresses on each in a different subnet to the wireless network. The wireless network was 192.168.0.x and the wired was 192.168.1.x.
I then set a static IP address on the printer and could happily ping from the desktops to the printer.
However, every desktop seemed fine except for when the machines wanted to access the Internet (i.e the wireless connection). They just timed out on pings and in Internet Explorer. Some could access the internet fine, others for only 5 minutes and then timed out. One even had no access at all unless I pulled out the wired ethernet connection!. I had been setting up the following configuration on all the wired connections on each desktop:
IP: 192.168.1.x
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.1.1
For some reason or another, it appears that if you setup a gateway address on the second NIC, Windows XP can get confused by the looks of it. This is kind of understandable as how would Windows know which connection the DNS server and Internet connection is connected to??.
Simple solution, I just removed the gateway address. This seemed to allow Windows XP to send the everyday traffic over the wireless connection, but whenever they wanted to print, it would happily send out the traffic over the gateway-less wired connection.
Now if you were connecting to another router on the second network connection, you couldn’t do this however, but because I was only networking the machines using a simple switch I could.
Technorati Tags:
Windows XP, Networking, Wireless, Ethernet
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