[BC] Windows 7 networking

[Alex Hartman]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 6:46 AM, Rob Landry <011010001 at interpring.com> wrote:
>
> Is it just me, or is Windows 7 networking this ugly?

Nope. Not just you.

Multiple gateways on a dual-homed Win7 machine require a bit of
advanced knowledge of how TCP/IP stacks work.

Go into the "advanced" tab in the IP settings window and set a
"metric" on the secondary interface. Don't let windows do it for you.
It'll fight itself. Set your primary NIC to have a metric of 1 and
your secondary NIC a metric of 4 or something lower. This will force
the stack to use the NIC of your choosing as it's primary network.
Also, remove the gateway from the secondary NIC. Dual gateways always
confuse windows. If the gateway is set via DHCP, having a lower metric
on the interface should suppress the secondary gateway as well. You
can verify by dropping to a command prompt and typing "route print"
and look at the metrics of all the routes.

Linux networking is a lot more difficult honestly for dual-homed
hosts. If all you're using the second NIC for is to get access to
another physical network, it shouldn't be difficult, if you're using
it as a router/gateway for other machines to access said physical
network, it gets tricky quick. Gets even better if it's your internet
gateway configured to "bond" or "failover" on multiple NICs...

Linux is by far more powerful than windows networking in this respect,
but if you don't know what you're doing, you can easily take down an
entire network with one wrong setting.

--
Alex Hartman