We have a Vista computer that has been doing most of the printing for our shop. We recently moved it to where it would need to be on wifi from a shared modem/router/gateway, and it seems to refuse to be part of that internet-capable network, and the LAN that it sends print jobs on.
Is this possible in Vista? Is there a trick to geting that done?
Not sure but I don’t see why not.
The trick with multiple network connections is that there is only one default gateway.
Traffic will go out the correct network card for that subnet (i.e. directly connected network) but by default, all other traffic goes out the default gateway.
I suspect the default gateway is currently configured to be on the original LAN and so the Wifi connection will not work as an internet connection. You may have to hardcode addresses? From your description, the default gateway should be the Wifi modem.
Beyond that - I’ve not worked with Vista much, but even as far back as NT there were “routing tables”. If there are subnets beyond the local subnet on the wired connection without the default gateway, you can “ROUTE ADD” iff necessary.
(Other commands, like ROUTE PRINT show you routing configuration. Windows routing is a whole chapter of learning. The 0.0.0.0 route shows you where it will send IP traffic that is outside any more specifically known networks. )
I do this all the time with all different versions of windows. On my setups only one network (the building-wide network) is set up for DHCP. All of the others (I have a total of four) use hard-coded IP addresses.
You should only have one default gateway, otherwise things get confusing when the computer tries to find addresses that aren’t on its local subnets.
The two networks must be on separate subnets and there can’t be any IP range overlap between the two networks. When the computer tries to route messages, it’s going to look at the IP of where it’s trying to route to, and it’s either going to pick the LAN’s subnet, the wifi subnet, or if the IP isn’t within either of those two ranges, it will route it through the default gateway. The default gateway should therefore be the connection that leads to the internet.
If the printer is on another subnet that is attached to the LAN then you’ll need to get fancy and add a route (route add…), because otherwise the computer is going to try to route traffic to it over the wifi since it has the default gateway.
It’s possible in Windows 7. It was possible in XP. Therefore, it’s almost certain it’s possible in Vista. My PC is even able to share it’s internet connection with devices on a second network.
The previous posters have explained fairly well how to do it.
One change in using the 2nd interface is that the default route gets overridden.
Why was the default route in use anyway ? The LAN may have had a router… If the LAN was actually in multiple segments (eg LAN1 > router > LAN 2 ) there is a way to add permanent routes to Windows, so that it knows where LAN 2 is…
Another change is using the DNS and WINS… perhaps add WINS configuration to the windows to get it to use the windows server for WINS…
and keep DNS for internet .