Using two network adapters for local network and Internet

briantonkinson · Aug 17, 2023

For reasons I won't bore you with I find myself in the following situation:

I have a local area network where my PC and my Synology NAS are attached to the same 1GBps switch, this network is also linked to the Internet via a Powerline adapter. This is fine for the NAS but I'm not getting the full Internet bandwidth I need from my PC. So I've brought a decent wifi adapter and get much better speeds to the Internet using this.

However it means access between PC and NAS is slow because it has to go PC > Wifi > Router > Powerline > Switch > NAS (with Powerline being the weak link here).

Is it possible to configure Windows so I can have both my Ethernet adapter and Wifi adapter enabled and route all local traffic (subnet 255.255.255.0) to Ethernet and anything else via wifi?

At the moment my workaround is to just use wifi but if I need to transfer large amounts of data between PC and NAS I switch off Wifi and enable the ethernet port (so I get slower Internet access but very fast access to my NAS).

Note not having internet on the ethernet network is not an option because the NAS needs internet access.

Hoping someone can help - thanks in advance.

Rishab7 · Aug 28, 2023

Yes, it is possible to configure Windows so you can have both your Ethernet adapter and WiFi adapter enabled and route all local traffic (subnet 255.255.255.0) to Ethernet and anything else via WiFi.

Here are the steps on how to do it:

Open the Windows Control Panel.
Click on Network and Sharing Center.
Click on Change adapter settings on the left-hand side.
Right-click on your Ethernet adapter and select Properties.
Click on the Advanced tab.
In the Advanced Settings dialog box, scroll down to the Routing section.
Check the box next to Use default gateway on remote subnet.
Click on OK to close the Advanced Settings dialog box.
Repeat...

Neemobeer · Aug 17, 2023

You would need to look at your routes with the command route print If the wireless interface default route 0.0.0.0 is has the same metric and the ethernet NIC then you would need to add a route with a lower metric for the local network.

Rishab7 · Aug 28, 2023

Yes, it is possible to configure Windows so you can have both your Ethernet adapter and WiFi adapter enabled and route all local traffic (subnet 255.255.255.0) to Ethernet and anything else via WiFi.

Here are the steps on how to do it:

Open the Windows Control Panel.
Click on Network and Sharing Center.
Click on Change adapter settings on the left-hand side.
Right-click on your Ethernet adapter and select Properties.
Click on the Advanced tab.
In the Advanced Settings dialog box, scroll down to the Routing section.
Check the box next to Use default gateway on remote subnet.
Click on OK to close the Advanced Settings dialog box.
Repeat steps 4-8 for your WiFi adapter.

Once you have completed these steps, all local traffic will be routed to your Ethernet adapter and any other traffic will be routed to your WiFi adapter.

Using two network adapters for local network and Internet

briantonkinson

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Rishab7

Neemobeer

Cloud Security Engineer

Rishab7

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