Networking

[Merlin]

It's been a while, but I see most are astill here.

Here's the Question.
Motherboard has two LAN ports.
I want to use one for wireless printing going through a Cisco wireless router.
The other for internet.
Do I have to change the IP addresses in one of them in order for it to work?

 

[marfig]

Hi. Yup. Both are independent lan ports that you can use for:

- Two different and independent networks (your case)
- To serve as a redundant backup (if one port fails, you can use the other)
- To bridge two distinct networks in your computer (serving computers in one network to services in the other)
- To serve as specialized ports on high traffic networks, where having one port only upstreaming and the other port only downstreaming can increase network speeds (this is usually a preferred setting for high traffic servers)

You can configure both networks independently, as you'll no doubt see two distinct adapters in Windows 7. The one port in your computer connecting to the LAN port on the wireless router, should be set to the Cisco router LAN settings, whatever they are.

 

[Glider]

Also note, Windows is too dumb to differentiate the ports if they are on the same subnet, so they'll have to be in different subnets... It's like networking done wrong