Managing 2 network connections

Soldato
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Nuneaton, UK
I have 2 network ports on my pc.

Port 1 is my O2 ADSL router. (11mb)

Port 2 goes to a switch, then a router then a cable modem (20mb), also has my dads media centre on the switch.

Is there anyway I can make my pc use Port 1 for web browsing and gaming and use port 2 possibly for downloading (Newsleecher) but it really needs to file share to the media centre at least

Right now I booted with both connections and my pc used port 2 as that is Network 1 which its been using for the last week where Vista created network 2 today when I connected the O2 box up.

I have a load balancing Edimax router but don't really want to use this as its only 10/100mb and I bought a 1Gb switch to transfer files quicker across the network.

Any help would be great, at the moment I have disabled Port 2 so I'm using my O2 but this won't be any good when the media centre is in use.

Thanks
 
You could setup a socks proxy server which binds to the 20mbs cable modem, then configure newsleecher to use said socks proxy. Wingate is the first which springs to mind but there are surely others which are more light weight.
 
I'd go with static routes though they can't differentiate services.
The other option is to set firewall rules separately for each adapter to block the traffic you don't want to go via that adapter. I reckon you can do this in vista if they're in separate "network localtions".
You could do a simlar thing using the filtering rules on the routers if you have static IPs on the cards. This is arguably easier than Vista :)
 
You say you have a load balancing router so why don't you plug both WAN connections into that, and then put your new gigabit witch into a port on that, then connect client devices to the gigabit switch.

Then you will get load balancing/fail over you can probably direct certain types of traffic to each connection and all devices on the switch communicate at gigabit speeds with each other.

Just my two pennies worth but that sounds like a more practical and sensible option than messing around with proxies and static routes on your PC.
 
^^^ What Wij said ;)

Have used 'Kerio Winroute Firewall' to do load balancing/failover/directing different traffic over different connections for work... But it's expensive :)
 
I tried it with the load balancing router but I couldn't make the game just use the O2 connection, I did try port forwarding but to no avail.

I have a friend that works in networking so will see if I can get him to come up with something.

All this static routes is confusing, I just started a new job and have loads to learn already lol.
 
I would just set up firewall rules on both routers. Block everything but downloading on the VM one. Then block only downloading on the O2 one and the connections will only have one way to go.
 
They will be fine. When you configure Firewall rules you specify source and destination addresses. So you just make sure your PC has static IPs on both Network adapters and set the rule with your adress as source and the wildcard 0.0.0.0 as the destination then just put in the port ranges you want to block.
 
That sounds very complicated. I think I used wingate before but had no idea what I was doing.

i got it working in like 2 minutes after a quick google for "free windows socks proxy".

download socks.exe from http://3proxy.ru/download/

socks /?
Usage: socks options
Available options are:
-d go to background (daemon)
-fFORMAT logging format (see documentation)
-l log to stderr
-lFILENAME log to FILENAME
-bBUFSIZE size of network buffer (default 4096 for TCP, 16384 for UDP)
-t be silenT (do not log service start/stop)
-iIP ip address or internal interface (clients are expected to connect)
-eIP ip address or external interface (outgoing connection will have this)
-pPORT - service port to accept connections
Example: socks -i127.0.0.1

(c)2000-2006 3APA3A, Vladimir Dubrovin & Security.Nnov

This should get a basic socks proxy going:

socks.exe -i127.0.0.1 -p8080 -eYOUR_CABLE_IP -d


(make a scheduled task to run this at startup)

Open Newsleecher and go to Connection -> Firewall.

Select Socks 5 Proxy

Server: 127.0.0.1
Port: 8080

OK
 
I'd go with static routes though they can't differentiate services.

Sadly very true, this is why I mentioned 1 or 2 things.
I was using a similar system but as I startedto get more things I wanted it started to become impractical. I ditched the ADSL and just ran with the cable.
 
I got it all set up.

My mate set up static routes now I can game on the O2 while downloading a film from the Cable. Also outlook uses the VM else I can't send email from my VM account using my O2 connection, they must block other ip's.

It also works for fail over, If my O2 was to die (primary connection) then it automatically uses the cable and I wouldn't hardly notice.
 
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