I want to have my cake and eat it too

August 31, 2008 3:52 PM

My computer has a wireless adapter (for internet) and an ethernet cable to a router (not internet-connected). How can I let it access the internet while also being able to access the lan through 192.168.1.X? I can only set it to access one or the other, but not both.

If it's any help, I was able to get both connections working together for an hour (using the connection setup wizard), then lost it.

posted by lpctstr; to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Are you using a recent version of Windows? You should be able to go into the Network Connections control panel and make sure both connections are enabled and active. I'm not sure what you mean by "only set it to access one or the other" - are you talking about your default gateway? If so, I'm pretty sure Windows will try to use that connection first, and fall back to any other active ones if the first one doesn't work. If that's not what you're talking about, could you provide a little more information on what OS you have and what the network setup dialog boxes contain?
posted by xbonesgt at 4:02 PM on August 31, 2008

The easiest way is to make sure your wireless has a default gateway set and make sure your wired connection does not have a default gateway set.

The other way is to go into the advanced tcp/ip properties and manually set a lower metric for the wireless connection than the wired one (I think you may have to reboot after changing this).
posted by samj at 4:10 PM on August 31, 2008

There wasn't a way to simply remove the default gateway, but I set the interface metric to 9999 on the lan connection, and everything works now!
posted by lpctstr; at 4:26 PM on August 31, 2008