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Am I allowed to have multiple ethernet interfaces on a WinXP/Win7 host, that share the same IP-subnet?

Scenario:

There are multiple USB adapters, that are using RNDIS (usb-ethernet-gadget) and Zeroconf to communicate to the host. Thus if I plug in two adapters, there will be two new ethernet interfaces but both will shared the same address space 169.254.X.X/16.

Is WinXP/Win7 clever enough to find out the correct route to each adapter?

Edit:

WinXP/Win7 Zeroconf: If there are multiple interfaces and one has already a Zeroconf IP address configuration e.g. subnet 169.254.1.X, will the other interface automatically get another subnet e.g. 169.254.2.X?

Nathan C
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Friedrich
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1 Answers1

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I am not sure I get you correctly.

Do you mean that the interfaces are in the same subnet and should communicate normally (one has 192.168.0.1 and the other 192.168.0.2 as an example). If that is the case, the answer is yes, this will work without problems.

If you mean that the two interfaces have the same subnet/mask but actually should form two different networks (with possible duplicate IP addresses in the two networks), this would not work.

Sven
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  • Both interfaces may share the same subnet, but are not connected to each other. Since zeroconf will use the MAC to compute the IP address, both usb-gadgets will have a different IP address. So it's case 1. of your answer. – Friedrich Mar 04 '12 at 14:43
  • Ok, that should work flawlessly. – Sven Mar 04 '12 at 14:51