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How to setup dual NIC's

SunnyD

SunnyD

Belgian Waffler
Basically, I am looking to setup OpenVPN on my system so that while I'm on the road, I can VPN in and map my network resources without having to go through remote desktop. I would prefer to do this with a dedicated server box, but unfortunately I don't have those resources available to me.

So what I have going on is on my main workstation at home, I have the main NIC (motherboard integrated). Now I'm thinking that if I'm using OpenVPN and am bridging the TAP adapter to the primary NIC full time, it's going to cause some performance issues on the home workstation (I know, I'm on cable, but there's still going to be overhead).

But - what I was thinking is that I can add a second NIC and bridge the TAP adapter to that. The only question I have is how to I ensure that if that adapter is connected to the network full time, any non-VPN based traffic (general computer use) is routed through the non-bridged adapter? Would this be as simple as setting the metric value for each adapter in the device manager?

Thanks in advance!
 
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Your computer keeps it's IP routing information in a single table, regardless of the number of NICS that you have and how they are connected. You only get ONE default gateway. (OK, you can put in multiple default gateways on different NIC's but it will round-robin between them).

The only possible benefit that you would see would be to have a router that does port forwarding and forward the VPN traffic to the specific NIC. That probably won't buy you much, however, as you can't control which interface the server will use to reply.

- G
 
Well, I never responded because I can't figure how it could possibly be worth the trouble to do this for a single-user computer.

The maximum VPN traffic is going to be around 500kbps (since you will be limited by the UPLOAD speed of the cable modem connection or the UPLOAD speed of your remote connection). So VPN traffic won't make any significant difference to a single 100Mbps (or faster) Ethernet connector being used in single-user mode on a local network.
 
Originally posted by: Garion
The only possible benefit that you would see would be to have a router that does port forwarding and forward the VPN traffic to the specific NIC. That probably won't buy you much, however, as you can't control which interface the server will use to reply.
- G
Click to expand...

The server would be forced to use the NIC bound to the TAP VPN adapter to reply, as that would be the only one that would support the VPN!
 
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