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ey143

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Easy question - Curious

What would happen if I was using my broadband connection and then tried to connect my 56k modem via a dial-up? Which downstream service would the computer use and can you designate what internet programs use what facilities?
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Les Moore
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To find out the effect, type C:\>route print
Note the default gateway and the metric of 1
Now connect via modem and do it again. You should now see two default routes (default is shown like this:
  0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0      192.168.1.1   192.168.1.102       20

If you have XP, it uses dynamic metric assignment. You can see here the metric of 20 for my default. Since that is still the lowest metric, that route is prefered. If I dialed up to another ISP, I would get a 2nd default route, but XP will recognize that it is a slower connection and assign it a metric of 50, so all traffic will still go out my lan card. You can manually change it, or remove the automatic metric assignment, and then what typically happens is that the last default entered becomes the prefered route. i.e. If I dial up, my slower dialup connection could become the prefered route.

All applications use the same IP stack, so you can't really direct traffic by application. However, if you have an application that connects to a specific IP address, then you can create static routes directing the way to that particular ip address/subnet. Every packet that does not have a specified route in the route table will be forwarded out to the default gateway.
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ey143

ASKER

ok that was a bit too technical for me.  I tried this myself and the speed of my adsl felt like it stopped. so in simple english, is this meant to happen?
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Les Moore
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