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Hey guys,

Sorry to ask what seems to be such an easy question, but it works out not to be...at least for me...I am confident that one of you can figure it out pretty fast. Anyways, I have a file server that I also need an internet connection on so that I can share the net connection with my roomie through the phonelines *pukes* Anyways, so I have a switch and a router. I have 3 network cards in my file server and 2 in my main rig. Now, I have two of them plugged in to the switch and I have them manually configured for IP with no DNS server listed. What I want is for all internet traffic to go thru the new router and for all the file sharing that I do over my network to go through the switch that I already had. Anyone have any ideas how to do this? I am stumped...when I browse my Network Neighborhood and check out the task manager Networking properties...it shows that all my traffic is moving through the router..which I do not want. BTW, I am running Windows XP.

Please help me!

Thanks,

Matt

P.S. - To help clarify

This is what I want to do with my network. I want to use my existing 5 port switch and my 4 port router in order to separate my networks. I want to have a file sharing network thru the switch and have the internet come through the Router. Right now....all traffic goes through the Router. Does that help at all??


Computer 1.......................................Switch..............................................Computer 2

nic 1 -------------------------------------X X------------------------------------- nic 1

This connnection c1 nic 1 to switch to c2 to nic 1 is for file sharing only(at least that's what I want it to be)


Computer 1.........................................Router................................................Computer 2

nic 2 ----------------------------------------X X----------------------------------------onboard nic

This connection solely for internet.

Is this impossible? I am sure there has to be a way to do it...can someone please help me with this? FlyingPenguin? anyone?

set the NIC in the server to what ever IP address, on your computer map the drive to that IP address.



That should pull the data through the real network.

I dont quite understand the way you are pharseing it, but have you tried setting the routers ip as the default gateway??

Another vote here for not being able to understand your setup and what you are trying to do. Explain it again, and we will try to help..

ok its easy? Put a modem in The FS... then tell it to share the connection... then hook it to the network and plug as may computers into a hub as needed... tell the other computers to use DHCP to get ips and the FS will do the rest.

I think... thats how my stuff runs.

Ok, yeah, I guess I did a bad job wording it, so ya know what, jus forget about it. I will figure it out eventually. But thanks for all you guys help, but no one hit the nail on the head this time. Oh well, win some lose some. BUT...if you have any suggestions, please don't hesistate to post them and I will check them out.

Matt

ok... while you get credit for drawing pretty ascii diagram, you get lashed with a wet noodle for still not making any sense...


you can't tell your computers that okay, "i want you to use 1 of your NICs strictly for internet access and the other for LAN/file access" just doesn't work that way... (well, i suppose it could if you can dictate what ports and/or types of traffic are used by which NIC) if you have two NICs on each computer and one is connected to switched ports on a broadband router for internet access, and the other NIC on each computer is connected to a switch of hub, traffic is still going to go through both devices. now you can specify in your TCP/IP settings that to bind DNS servers and IP gateway to just 1 of the NICs in your computer, but the fact is that Windows taffic will still go through that (and probably the other NIC as well). obviously, the other NIC won't be able to route and resolve Internet stuff by doing this...

quite frankly, i still don't get why you would even want to try to segregate your traffic, assuming that you could... if you want to keep sensitive data off the net, put it on another computer, don't have it plugged into your broadband router, and assign it to a different subnet than the computers plugged into your router.

OR... if you're trying to do this because you want to maximize bandwidth on your LAN, connect all of them to your router, and in Windows, load balance (bridge) your two NICs together. XP doesn't have it down perfectly, but it kinda works...

Thanks for the responses, all...but I think I got it figured out. I have verified that my solution has worked via the Windows Task Manager - Network Tab. When I browse my network, only my File Sharing NIC is in use, when I browse the Internet only my internet nic is in use. So, I assume that this means I have found my solution. Regardless, I get much better performance out of both the internet and my internal network now, so I assume this has been a success. I simply turned off file and printer sharing on the internet connection on both machines and left it enabled on the file serving NICs. I also plugged the router into my switch using the uplink port and whalla...after much fiddling (read: so I don't know what I did to actually make it work ) I am now up and running again, and very happy with the results. So There

unless you access the files from the server like all the time, you really wouldn't need all this trouble....

Dopey,

I use my file server to store almost every file that I have and will sometimes watch a movie through the network while surfing the net...and it used to stutter, which it does not do anymore. I also use it to play my MP3's from my file server. I was just sick of the delay if there was a lot of internet traffic going out when browsing the network...now it is gone.

Matt