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2 Gateways - 1 NIC

Tags:
  • LAN
  • Networking
  • NIC
  • Internet Access
  • Gateways
  • Internet Service Providers
Last response: in Networking
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December 12, 2013 3:49:32 AM

I have two ISP gateways and one Server with a single NIC. What additional equipment would I need to make the two gateways connect to my single NIC or do I need another NIC to do this?

My Boss is trying to tell me that I can connect the 2 gateways to my "server" through a switch. I'm pretty sure that's not going to work!

More about : gateways nic

December 12, 2013 3:52:42 AM

you'd need two NIC's.

The more important question is though, what are you going to do with the two connections on the server.
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December 12, 2013 3:57:23 AM

changstar1 said:
I have two ISP gateways and one Server with a single NIC. What additional equipment would I need to make the two gateways connect to my single NIC or do I need another NIC to do this?

My Boss is trying to tell me that I can connect the 2 gateways to my "server" through a switch. I'm pretty sure that's not going to work!


Why do you want to do this?

It may be possible via a switch but depends on what you want to do.
If you want to combine the 2 lines for loadshedded breakout then you will need a line bonder.
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a b X LAN
a b 2 Internet access
December 12, 2013 4:16:41 AM

You might be able to VLAN them in a managed switch. I'd just get a cheap gigabit PCIe NIC, though. Most servers will have a few spare slots.
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a b X LAN
a b 2 Internet access
December 12, 2013 7:12:42 AM

Getting both gateways connected is pretty easy. Actually using them effectively is another story.

So to get them connected is simple. Lets assume you main router has a lan address of 192.168.1.1 and is running DHCP. You cable your second router to the first lan-lan. You could use a switch if you really wanted instead of direct cabling. You assign you second router a IP of 192.168.1.2 and disable the DHCP.

You now have both gateways on the same network.

Now the hard part is you can only have a single "default" gateway on your machine so you must manually configure traffic to use the second gateway. This is done with the ROUTE command. What you would do would be say I want my netflix and youtube traffic to use the second gateway and everything else to use the main gateway. You would put in route command for the ip for netflix and youtube setting the gateway for those networks to 192.168.1.2.

You can get a dual wan router than can do some of this function but in many cases you still must manually tell it which connection to use for what kinds of traffic. If you only have a small number of machines using the ROUTE command will work but it gets very tedious pretty quickly the more machines you have
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