Hello all, I have two NICs in my XP pro machine. One goes to my ADSL router and provides LAN and internet. The other is peered to my test server. Problem: When both NICs are enabled, internet connections dont work properly. Using IE to access the net provides no results. The internet connection is up but no connection can be established, i.e. no google, no computing.net, no nada. Facts: 1.if i disable the local p2p nic, everything works fine on the ADSL side (hence why i can write this). 2.I have set the device priority correctly in 'adapters and bindings' in the advanced tab of net connections. 3.if i ping a remote site(eg google.com), the namespace will be resolved to an IP address by DNS but the ping packets will all fail. again, disabling the local (2nd) NIC allows the ping to complete. 4.packet capturing shows that with both cards enabled, the DNS service is returning the IP from the CNAME record correctly when the pages are requested in IE, but no further connection is being established. Soon as the 2nd card is disabled, TCP SYN ACK negotiations complete fine. So: Why is the 2nd card interrupting the services of the 1st card when the priorities have been set and how do i prevent this from happening so that internet connections can be established with both cards enabled? This is driving me insane so if you have any ideas, i will be most grateful. -D- -D- nosey aren't ya, readin me sig?

Typical windows behaviour with more than one NIC. I've experience problems with multihoming windows since NT 4.0. My suggestion, remove the second card, get a switch and plug your server and PC into it. Then you can communicate with the server while having the ability to surf the web without having to play enable/disable games with the NIC's.

How exactly do you have the priorities setup? Using metrics? Do you simply have numeric metrics setup on a NIC basis, or do you have gateway metrics setup as well? If I remember correctly, a lower metric indicates higher priority. My first suspicion is that maybe the NIC you wish to have the higher priority is being used only for the DNS resolution, and the second NIC is being used for the rest of the traffic. On your NIC that goes to your test server, do you even have a gateway IP configured? If not, then disregard this message. Are the IP addresses on both interfaces on different subnets? Just trying to get a feel for your physical setup. Seems like you already took a proactive step by sniffing some traffic...

looks like what might be happening is like Smitty hit on there. the metrics for both gateways routes are the same. i ran ROUTE PRINT from command line and the routing tables show both gateways have a metric of 20. i am just trying to work out how to run a CHANGE command to adjust the metric manually and configure it as a persistant route. if anyone knows the syntax for that, i would be grateful. route print output is 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.253 20 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.255.2 192.168.255.101 20 -D- nosey aren't ya, readin me sig?

I have solved it cheers folks. i went into advanced settings on TCP/IP properties - you can set gateway and NIC metrics manually from there so just gave the 2nd gateway a higher metric and bada-bing. primary gateway gets the cheese everytime. cheers for that pointer Smitty. did a bit of googling and it was simple in the end -D- nosey aren't ya, readin me sig?

No problem, glad I could be of assistance.