I've got a Windows 2008 machine with two network adapters in it. One's connected to the corporate network, and the other's connected to a private (lab) network. They're both configured by DHCP. They don't overlap: the corporate network is a 192.168.x.y network, and the lab network is a 10.a.b.c network. Both networks are always up.
That said, the lab itself is partitioned into two subnets: 10.5.26.x and 10.5.24.x. There's an R/RAS box connecting those subnets. This machine is connected to 10.5.26.x. I don't particularly need this box to get directly to the 10.5.24.x network (it's simulating a low-bandwidth link), so I've not set up static routing.
The lab is only connected to this computer. I have squid (and WSUS) configured on the machine to allow the lab to access the outside world.
I'd like this machine to ignore the lab network's 003 Router option (the default gateway) and the 006 DNS Servers option. If it uses these, its connection to the Internet becomes unreliable (because of the conflicting gateway options).
I also don't particularly want to use static IP on the private adapter, because then network location awareness doesn't work, and I can't then easily configure the private/public setting.
I guess that I can configure the DHCP server on the private network to issue the "external" router and DNS server entries for that particular reservation, but that seems like a hack.
Anyone got any better ideas?
Best Answer
You could try using the "Interface Metric" option on each interface under the Advanced settings to control which interface is higher priority than the other. You can look at your "route print" command to see what metrics are currently used but setting the interface you wish to use to 1 should do the trick and would still allow you to fail back to the other connection in case something went wrong with your primary interface.