Is it possible to tell certain programs to use different NICs if you have more than one?
ie, the bittorrent goes out through a router via the WLAN adapter and direct wired connect for gaming?
Hmmm. In general, no, you can’t do that. You can set up load balancing, but there’s no policy-based way I know of to route traffic in Windows to different NICs.
In theory, if you set one of the NICs to have priority and then in your router configure the ip address of the non-prioirty NIC to receive port forwards for bitttorrent, you might be able to do what you want.
I’ve never done this and I may just be talking out of my ass sending you on a wild goose chase. But it’s where I’d start.
i know about setting metrics and don’t want to mess with routing tables…but i have both a wired and wireless connection. the wired one is direct to cable modem, the wireless to the home lan through a router.
even though i am on 25mbit the problem is if i start more than 1 big downloader program (blizz downloader which uses bt, + sony station downloader) it kills my internet (i lost all connectivity suddenly and had to reset the modem) because of provider-side throttling at too many connections being open.
hence, me wanting to do my downloads through the qos-managed router and my game-playing on the wired connection.
don’t want to mess with qos and run everything through wireless–it’s still too iffy to use for gaming
Try putting everything behind the router, and set the maximum connections to 4096 and the TCP/UDP timeouts to 120 (done in the administration settings in DD-WRT). If that doesn’t help, drop the number of connections until it works fine. Also, I’d not use the wireless unless you’ve saturated your wired connection’s bandwidth.
I’m assuming that you’re using DD-WRT if you have access to QoS features, which I wouldn’t use anyway. DD-WRT’s QoS is absolute crap.
wired connection won’t reach the router.
Programmatically you can choose which available network connection to bind to if multiple adapters are available but I’m not aware of any kind of setting in Windows that lets you manage this in programs that aren’t programmed specifically to allow you to do it.
You might want to poke around in the options of your bittorrent using apps to see if they give you the option of what local IP address to bind to. Dedicated bittorrent clients will almost surely have this as a configurable setting, but I dunno about the blizz/Sony downloaders. If they do allow you to set it, though, you should be able to make the wired NIC your default and then tell those clients to bind to the IP address associated with your wireless NIC.
That… should work.
I see that utorrent has some advanced settings that let you bind the incoming and outgoing IP addresses: (net.bind_ip, net.outgoing_ip)
But don’t try and split those to different IP addresses. Set them to the same one, whichever IP you choose.
You can actually do this but it’s a bit of a pain since the only way I’ve seen it done is either manually adding routes to the windows route table or third party routing software. In each case I have not seen that you can restrict a certain application to one connection unless it’s via the destination. It is possible that the third party routing programs now do this though or at a minimum will route based on the destination port.
Where does that do load balancing? Its entire feature list revolves around traffic shaping.
I would recommend doing all this load balancing in a router so it can use NAT to rewrite the tcp/ip packet destinations so you’d be able to use most of your favorite protocols like http or bittorrent.
Here’s a tutorial for doing dual WAN on a DD-WRT: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Dual-WAN_for_simple_round-robin_load_equalization
oops. yeah, won’t do anything for load-balancing multiple nics.