Windows 2000 Server with 2 NICs Ignores Provider Order

[mbmast]

I have a problem and I'm not certain it's a WinGate issue.

I just re-built my Windows 2000 Server machine after a failed hard drive. I am now experiencing a problem I've never experienced before. I have two NICs: one outward facing to the Internet (connection named "External") and one internal facing to the LAN (connection named "Internal"). If I open a browser (pointed to something like yahoo.com), I can see, via the network connections' status window, that all the TCP requests are going to the Internal connection. If I disable the Internal connection, then all the TCP requests go to the External connection and, of course, the browser works. If I then re-enable the Internal connection, the browser continues to issue requests to the External connection and all is well.

After a re-boot, once again the browser attempts to communicate using the Internal connection and I must again use the disable/enable trick to get it working again.

In the Network and Dial-up Connections dialog > Advanced > Advanced Settings ... > Provider Order dialog tab, I do have the External connection listed first and the Internal connection listed second.

I am running a WinGate 6 bound to the Internal adapter. WinGate's DNS service is disabled. The browser is configured to NOT use the proxy server (or any proxy server).

What is wrong? Why does the browser continue to attempt to use the Internal connection first?

[adrien]

Hi

make sure you don't have a setting on your internal adapter for default gateway - this should be blank.

Adrien

[mbmast]

That fixed the problem. The gateway setting on the internal NIC was set to the IP address of the internal NIC (198.162.0.1).

How did that cause a browser running on the server (the same machine that WG runs on) that is not configured to use a proxy to attempt to use the internal facing NIC instead of the external facing NIC?

Thanks,

Mike.

[adrien]

a default route is one that says "the internet is available this way".

When you assign a default gateway to an adapter, you are telling your OS that the internet is available out that adapter.

If the gateway address is the same as the IP of the adapter, that's saying that every machine on the internet is directly connected to that adapter as well.

It will of course believe you whether the internet is attached to that adapter or not, and use it. If you have several default routes/default gateways, then the OS will use the first one first, or the one with the smallest metric value.

Adrien