Cascade Crew

[91RSVert]

I have a machine that is currently on a lan that is for file storage and access.

I am wanting to keep that ability, and add a wireless pci card and have ONLY the internet accessing that pci card.

broke down....
IE uses wireless
files on storage uses lan

possible?

[Alphius]

It is possible. Will the wireless card be connecting to a totally different network than the wired line? Or the same logical network?

What operating system are you running? Windows of some flavor? XP, Vista

Need to know more about your setup to help. Should be easy enough.

What's your skill level? There's a lot of specifics based on what your current setup and proposed setup are.

I'm a network administrator/engineer by trade. I do this all day for a living...

[91RSVert]

Has winduhs 2000pro. ,2.8gig, 1g ram, 120sata drive

Yes, the wireless will be accessing *cough* another network for internet only.

Lan will be for file sharing to current net.

I am borrowing a dell usb wireless for testing today. The wireless network I'm trying to access is right on the border for accessing with this setup. Wondering if an internal pci card will be stronger then a corded? But then corded has the ability to move around for max signal?

Didnt see how to make IE access wireless only. Doesnt have to be IE though, can use opera, firefox, chrome, w/e.

[Alphius]

EDIT:
A PCI adapter may have stronger signal, but more importantly you can get high-gain antennas for some PCI cards. If the USB works, don't worry about it though.
/EDIT

Well, the web browser really doesn't care how it gets to the internet; it just sees that there is a network or two, and there is a "default route" for accessing outside networks (The Internet).

Your "outside network" being wireless is automatically assigned a lower priority than the wired network by windows. Therefore your "default route" for outside networks is through the wired connection. This, apparently, is not what you want to occur.

With a little Command Prompt trickery, we can make windows assign a higher priority to the wireless connection, and any traffic to an outside network "The Internet" will be routed through that connection instead.

Now, with the networking primer out of the way, let's get down to business.



In the image above, green denotes commands to be typed, and red is the specific output we are looking for. You'll notice that after typing "ipconfig", you should see your two network cards. You'll see some important information about them, including their IP Addresses, which is like a street address for networks. The Default Gateway, though, is what we're interested in. You'll cross-reference this to the next command. After typing "route print", you will see the behind-the-scenes table that windows uses to decide where to send networking information. The important parts to look at will be the one or two lines that have the Destination and Netmask as 4 zeroes. "0.0.0.0" These are the default routes.

You can identify which line of data is for which network adapter by looking at the Interface column and cross-referencing to the output from "ipconfig". You will notice the Metric for the two connections are different numbers. This is the priority of each connection. The wired network should have a lower number than the wireless connection. Lower numbers get used first. For the Routing Metric, lower is better as far as windows is concerned.

Logically, the next step is to change the Metric for the wireless connection to be a lower number than the metric for the wired connection.
This will make your internet use the outside connection, while allowing your computer to be a fileserver for the inside network.

The command to do so, referenced to my output above, is this:

[91RSVert]

I'm going to find a better wireless, then try this out.

Sucks I will have to go thru this everyday, but w/e to please the boss!


Thanks!!!

[Alphius]

[91RSVert]