Need some guidance on 2 NIC routing

[nocum]

We need to setup a subnet for digital presses that are accessible to two XP Pro PCs. The presses are on one switch with each PCs second NIC attached to that switch. The primary NIC in each PC is attached to a 1Gbit LAN. Right now both NICs use the subnet of 192.168.42.xxx.

Access to the printers is available only when the 1Gbit LAN connection is disconnected. I have swapped the role of the internal NICS with the same results. My thought was to setup a separate subnet of 192.168.1.xxx for the presses and second NIC.

I think that I would have to set static routes to the printers through the secondary NIC, but I am not sure this would work and time doesn't allow experimentation. If I could do it without changing the IP addressing on the presses that would be even better. If someone could give me some guidance here so I don't dig a big hole for myself, it would be greatly appreciated.

"Whether you believe you can or you believe you cannot, either way you are right." Henry Ford

 

[pansophic]

You do not want to have two interfaces in the same subnet unless you are doing some form of loadsharing.

Assigning a second subnet to the press side of the network seems the most straight forward, since that will only affect 4 machines (the two presses and the two PCs).

I'm assuming that you are interchanging the words printers and presses in this context.

You would need to set up forwarding on one or both PCs and define a static route in the default gateway of the 192.168.42.xxx gateway like:

route add 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.42.<ip_of_PC> metric 1

route add 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.42.<ip_of_2nd_PC> metric 10

That will make PC 1 be the primary route to the presses, and PC 2 to be the secondary route to the presses. A higher metric indicates a less desirable route.


pansophic

 

[nocum]

Thank you Pansophic. You are correct about using different subnets. I was backed into a corner by the client early yesterday morning to resolve the issue and I did not have access to the programming features of the 3 presses.

Establishing static routes on one of two nics in the same PC in the same subnet works in these very specific circumstances.

Each PC has 2 NICs each with a static address in the 192.168.42.xxx subnet. One card is connected to a 1Gbit switch and the other card to a 10/100 Mbit switch. All presses (printers) are attached to the 10/100 switch with static IP addresses assigned in the same subnet.

All presses/printers drivers are loaded locally and routed to a TCP/IP address. Persistent static routes were added using the "route -p add <press IP> mask 255.255.255.255 <IP of NIC attached to 10/100 switch> metric 1" command for each press. The only unique setting was that the gateway setting on the NIC attached to the 10/100 switch in the PC was set to point to itself.

The client is very pleased as the upload speed to the presses is now 3 times faster than before and there is no degradation of performance on the rest of the LAN when jobs are uploaded.

I should mention that this was forced by a condition in a Konica BizHub Pro 1050 black and white press that would not initialize when attached to the LAN after adding a new Dell PowerEdge 2800 server and 16 workstations on a new 1Gbit wiring backbone. There were no Netbios name conflicts or MAC/hardware address conflicts as all were verified. All cabling was tested and patch cords replaced. Isolating it in the manor discribed above resolved the initialization problem on the BizHub while providing the enhance performance discribed above.

Please consider this thread as closed.

&quot;Whether you believe you can or you believe you cannot, either way you are right.&quot; Henry Ford