2 Network connections

[ethen]

Hi guys,

I've recently switched al my office computer to powermac, i have a quetions.

We have 1 T1 line and 1 DS3 line.

T1 line are used for us to surf intenet while our DS3 9t3) is used to serv our sites.

I have airport which connected to the T1 line and my ethernet is connected to the DS3 router.

Now if i want to download a file from a server that belongs to the same DS3 router, i want to use that connection (LAN) because it will give me around 80-100Mbps.

instead of T1 which gives me only around 1.5Mbps

Will Mac automatically detect the prefered connections or i can bridge the two connections withhin my airport and LAN?

Thanks for the help.

The current way of me doing it is to disable the airport when i'm downloading large files from the T3

 

[kbonnel]

Well, first I assume both connections are on completely different networks (i.e., WIFI on say 192.168.1.9, and the Ethernet on say 192.168.2.9 as examples). If that is the case, your gonna have a default route going out one of the 2 connections. (netstat -rn will show you this info using your terminal app). Normally if you access a file from a networked device that sits on one of the networks your system has a physical connection too, it should use that connection no matter what the default route is. (The default route is used when the system doesn't know how to get somewhere, so it will go to the default route to get information on how to get to your requested desitnation). There are execptions to this of course, like if you had setup any static routes to dictate which adapter to use to get to some specific location, but we won't deal with those.

You can test this a couple of ways, but the easiest is too run the netstat -rn command and review which NIC is being used to go to the desitnation device(s). So, as an example, if a file you want is being served by a machine on 192.168.2.10, and you obtain the file (via scp or whatever), your netstat output should show something like this:

Routing tables

Internet:
Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire
default 192.168.1.1 UGSc 15 62052 en0 (WIFI)
127 127.0.0.1 UCS 0 0 lo0
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 UH 12 194750 lo0
169.254 link#4 UCS 0 0 en0
192.168.2 link#5 UCS 0 0 en1 (Ethernet NIC)
192.168.2.10 link#5 UCS 0 0 en1
192.168.1 link#4 UCS 3 0 en0
192.168.1.1 link#4 UHLW 2 0 en0

This shows you that the connection to destination 192.168.2.10 is using the en1 NIC. Of course, if you have a very fast network connection on the ethernet you should see a much faster download too

Kimo

 

[ethen]

awesome, thanks, i'll try it on monday and see if it works.