File Sharing Between Two LAN's

DoZZa · Sep 16, 2014

Hello,

I am trying to figure out the best way to share large files between two computers on separate LAN's.

Both computers are in the same physical location, but connected to different routers.

Both computers are connected to the internet via different ISP's. But I am not interested in using a cloud based service due to the size of the files.

I am not sure if I can achieve this via networking or some other way of connecting the two computers together so they can communicate.

What are your thoughts?

hang-the-9 · Sep 16, 2014

If they are in the same location you can setup a gateway easily between the two networks using a network device between the two networks to connect them.

Since you are asking this question instead of just doing it, you would want to get the help of a network specialist to set it up to prevent any security issues and to make sure the computers you need to have access to the data do.

You can also setup a multi-homed server in a central location to host the files, that is a bit easier than configuring the networks, the server will have two network cards, one connected to one network, one to the other. You will need to setup user rights manually on the sever though for file access since it can be part of only one domain at a time.

DoZZa · Sep 17, 2014

hang-the-9 :

Thanks for the tips, although this comment "Since you are asking this question instead of just doing it". Roughly translated means, "you dont know what your doing so get someone who does".

Actually, its rather embarrassing, as I have been a network security specialist for over 15 years. But for the life of me I simply could not think of a way of doing this over a network. I kid you not!! Maybe I am just crap at what I do. Or just a matter of a simple brain fart!

But anyway, I managed to sort this out with a simple cable between the routers, I just changed the DHCP scopes on each router.

Here's an example for you.

Router1 LAN IP = 10.0.0.1
DHCP Scope = 10.0.0.3 through to 10.0.0.50

Router2 LAN IP = 10.0.0.2
DHCP Scope = 10.0.0.51 through to 10.0.0.100

A simple ethernet cable between a LAN port on each router gave me a working, multi ISP network. All clients are still using DHCP apart from one. As it does not matter which ISP the clients use.

Only one client needed a specific ISP, so I manually set the IP address settings to use 10.0.0.1 as a gateway and for DNS.

I appreciate that for some, this would not be the best course of action as clients may indeed need to use specific ISP's, and if you have a large network, manually assigning IP's will become somewhat of a chore. But I am sure there are ways around that with other routing options such as iptables or static routes.

But for me, all I had to do was change a few IP settings and use an ethernet cable and Im all good.

No need for any other hardware whatsoever.

Cheers

bill001g · Sep 17, 2014

This solution works when you can tolerate not caring which dhcp server or ip machines have and you can allow all the users to be in the same domain.

I suspect terse answer was because of how complex this is to do when you have a more standard install.

Say you have 2 routers and they each have different DHCP subnets (would be a nightmare if they were the same). So you have 192.168.0.x and 192.168.1.x. This is trivial if you have a commercial router. But when you look at the devices most people ask about on this forum they are "gateway" devices that only can have a single lan subnet and route all traffic out the wan port after natting the address. So likely you can do nothing with most consumer "routers" to solve this issue. Even if you were to place a router between the 2 networks you now have the problem of how does the PC know to send it to that device rather than the default gateway and if it were to send it to the default gateway does the router even have the ability to send it to device connecting the networks.

You will notice I am so far only discussing pure ip networking. You still have the issue of domain trust and the actual file shares to deal with.

My normal recommendation it to replace the firmware on the 2 device so they run as actual routers but putting third party firmware is beyond the skill level of many on this forum even if the devices would support it.

This question has been asked a number of times before and the solutions get extremely complex especially when you have to use something like a vpn to connect the locations.

hang-the-9 · Sep 18, 2014

DoZZa :

Technically you have all the systems setup on the same LAN, you said "separate LAN's" whouch means two different networks. You linked both routers into one bigger network. For true separate LANs you can't just connect things with a cable that way. And yes, doing things without fully being aware of how the networks talk to each other is best left to a specialists unless you don't have much need for security between the networks or file access. Plus keep in mind you may end up with network performance issues unless you use a managed router to keep traffic isolated between the two areas especially if you don't have the gateway or DHCP set for specific routers.

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