I have two ADSL links at the moment. One of them is the default gateway for my network, with the other running separately as a standby. If my primary ADSL fails I have to do some recabling and change a few IP addresses to move accross to the standby link.
I'd like to have both of these ADSL links on the network at the same time, so that if either fails the other link is automatically used with no manual intervention necessary.
So, would this config work ?
ADSL Link 1 - 192.168.0.254
ADSL Link 2 - 192.168.0.253
PC NIC (Win XP Pro OS) - 192.168.0.1
Under TCP/IP Advanced Properties, I add both of the ADSL link IP addresses as default gateways with an automatic metric.
With this setup, does XP use the gateway that responds first and will it automatically use the other one if the first fails ?
TIA
Rob
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ccfcfc,
Sad to say it's not possbile to have a seemless setup using windows only.
There are hardware that does this, linksys has a lot of these.
You can do a manual switch over using windows:
two nics.
config nic one with ADSL link 1 - 192.168.0.254
config nic two with ADSL Link 2 - 192.168.0.253
disable nic two and enablee nic one. - this is how you swtich over
Thanks.
Two gateways used to be tricky/impossible on Windows but now is possible with some predictability on XP. Check out:
http://www.microsoft.com/r
If you care which ADSL link is used as primary (maybe it's lower latency or higher capacity) then set the metric yourself, otherwise your automatic settings should work fine.
A side note here. This will work if your first gateway router fails. I'm not sure if Windows will be able to detect if the upstream link on the gateway fails. It is supposed to be able to do this via dead gateway detection, but I've not actually tried this myself on XP.
If the link fails and your XP client loses internet access, you would probably have to power down the ADSL modem with the bad link so that XP would see it as dead and start using the secondary gateway.
ccfcfc, a better solution would be to use an inexpensive hardware device designed to do exactly what you want. In addition, it can use both links simultaneously giving you better performance.
Check out the Linksys RV042 http://www.linksys.com/pro
"...the unique dual Internet ports on the 10/100 4-Port VPN Router let you connect a second Internet line as a backup to insure that you're never disconnected. Or, use both Internet ports at the same time, and let the router balance your office's requirements between them for maximum bandwidth efficiency. "
Jeopboy, what does "different, but still automatic, solution" mean? I'm trying to figure out whether to be offended or not ... ;) I'm in a wireless protocol analysis class and my brain is overheating ... :D
In my opinion, networking on Windows sucks. Anything to move it off the windows host and onto networking equipment is "automatically" better than doing it on the windows host.
Ha! No offense intended! Different is good.
My point was that they asked if it would automatically failover using their config on the single NIC. Short answer is yes, following the steps on the link I showed.
I agree with your answer that a better automatic failover solution is a router with two connections so that you can really monitor the upstream links, which may be at the root of this question.
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by: jeopboyPosted on 2005-05-11 at 05:38:49ID: 13977131
That should do the trick for enabling outbound connections.
It doesn't sound like you're doing any hosting of web, e-mail or FTP servers, but if you do so in the future, keep in mind that you will need a more complicated setup to try to provide failover for those services.
Good luck!