Manage multiple Internet connections in XP

Emanuel — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:47:30 -0800

My system has multiple Internet connections, and I want to be able to specify which of these connections particular applications will use. I run Windows XP Pro. Connection A is EVDO. It's low-latency but has a limited amount of bandwidth usage per month (with steep overage charges if I exceed it), and is ideal for highly interactive applications (such as VNC, Remote Desktop, SSH, Skype, and certain web sites).

Connection B is satellite. It's high-latency, but without any limitations on monthly bandwidth usage, which makes it ideal for large downloads and general web browsing.

I want to be able to specify that certain applications use connection A (e.g. PuTTY, VNC, and RoyalTS), and have the other applications use connection B. I'd also like to be able to block certain applications from accessing the Internet at all, or only allow them to access certain IP address ranges. If it were possible to have connections from an application to certain IP addresses use connection A, and connections from the same application to other IP addresses use connection B, that would be really cool (but this is functionality I can live without if that is not possible).

Another very nice feature would be the ability to monitor total bandwidth usage on each Internet connection. If it was possible to monitor bandwidth usage per-application, that would be even better!

Can anyone recommend some software that will help? Googling gives me tonnes of hits for blocking and firewall software, but I didn't come across anything that looked like it does what I want.

Ideally, this would be one package with a nice GUI, but mixing and matching is fine, and I'm entirely comfortable with a text editor and the command-line if required. If I need to, I'd be OK with setting up a Linux (or *BSD) firewall box to manage my connections, but I'd rather not have to resort to that (recommendations for distributions that would make this relatively painless are appreciated).

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Manage multiple Internet connections in XP