I have a media center set up on my home network with two NICs. Each NIC has been assigned a static IP:
eth0 192.168.0.254
eth1 192.168.1.253
Currently eth0 does everything network related and eth1 just sits idle. This computer also serves as my home server using NFS.
The NFS server and clients are already set up using eth0, so I’d like to set up eth0 to only handle LAN traffic and eth1 to only handle WAN traffic. This way, if I have bit-torrent or something running (using WAN), bandwidth within the LAN should be relatively unaffected.
This seems like it would be easy to do, but I have no idea where to start. Appreciate the help.
You would need a separate LAN or VLAN for a separate WAN subnet. But I suppose you have other computers that also need to go out on the WAN. They too would need two IP addresses and the switch would have to allow them to connect to two VLANs. Either that, or they use the media server as an IP gateway.
If you had a capable switch you could bond the two interfaces and get twice the bandwidth, thus maximising your NIC capacity.
In general though, the NICs are seldom the bottleneck so even if you have only one active NIC it’s not a problem.
PS: Something you could try though, install a specific route, saying for traffic going to the router, use eth1. That should take precedence over the implied rule of any traffic to the subnet, go via eth0.
Hmm. I thought this would be more common and therefore a solution simple.
I assume I would set up routing in the admin settings of my router. I do see a section called “Routing” but I can’t make much sense of it. My router is a D-Link DIR-655.