How to force IE to choose a network card in Windows?

Question

I have 2 network cards each connecting to a different network. For some web sites I need to force IE to use a particular one. How could this be done?

P.s. This is NOT VPN related. Both network connections are regular connections.

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 16 '09 at 15:09

5

You should familiriaze yourself with the notion of routing and use the route command.

answered Jul 16 '09 at 15:09

GrzegorzOledzki

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 16 '09 at 15:05

1

You should read up on the "route" command.

answered Jul 16 '09 at 15:05

lexu

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 17 '09 at 00:19

I had this issue with two disparit networks and I was connected to both of them, but needed certain websites to use certain NICs (it was a stupid setup).

Basically, find out the IP address of the website you want to resolve over each nic, then in the command prompt, enter:

route add x.x.x.x mask 255.255.255.255 y.y.y.y

x = IP address of website
y = IP address of NIC to use

And enjoy your newfound freedom :)

Worth noting with this method though the route will be deleted next time you restart. To make it persistant, put a -p on the end of the command.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 16 '09 at 15:09

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This is not really a question for Stack Overflow, but.. one way I can think of doing this is adding a route specific to the IP that site is hosted on. See here on how to add a route permanently.

answered Jul 16 '09 at 15:09

Thorarin

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 16 '09 at 19:15

This is not a feature available to web browsers (not in Windows or, afaik, OSX anyway).

If you don't mind all traffic to a set of addresses going over that particular network card then you can create a static route using the route command to do this. If you've got some weird requirement to ping the website or upload files to it via FTP or SMB from one network card while accessing it via HTTP with the other network card then 1) You're boned and 2) I feel very sorry for you.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Jul 16 '09 at 21:14

You need to make sure only one of your network cards has a default gateway. Windows are not really meant to have two default gateways. Since that defies the nature of default gateway (aka the place you go to get routed if the resource you want isn't on your local network.

You then need to set up your subnet masking on each of the two networks correctly, so that you can see the resources local to each that you need.

How to force IE to choose a network card in Windows?

6 Answers6