ME Connection Selection Issue

[Ethan Grace]

Thanks in advance for any information on this:

Situation:
I have client who uses an application that requires a dial-up connection to
the application provider. The provider gives Internet connectivity through the dial-up
connection. She also has a cable modem which gives +/- 10X the through-put of the
dial-up connection.

Problem:
When she uses the application (which is Not browser-based) and then clicks on
Internet Explorer, the packets use the much-slower dial-up connection. It looks
like ME/IE look for a Dial-Up connection before looking for a LAN connection (which
seems backwards to me...).

Request:
Does anyone have any ideas to force IE / ME to look for/use the cable LAN connection
for sending and receiving information when both a LAN and Dial-up connection are
connected to the Internet?

Thanks again all. Please reply if you need any additonal information that would
help. egrace@smfst.com -Ethan

[Lance Brown]

Dial-up takes precedence over the LAN. Me is a very limited OS and knows nothing about routing, which is what you are asking it to do. If she wants to be connected to two sources, the LAN and the dial-up provider, she should think about getting a router. Use DDR (dial on demand routing) to connect to the dial-up provider for a specific IP address or range and the rest of traffic to go through the cable modem. Both the dial-up and cable modem would be connected to the router. She could get away with a router with one Ethernet interface; two would be much better though.

Also, 2000 doesn???t do routing by default, so if you use a dial-up connection with it, the same results occur. 2000 is capable of routing though.

[Ron Kinner]

With both connections active, look at (in a DOS window):

route print

or

netstat -rn

Odds are both connections get a default route (0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 thensomegateway) and that the default route from the dialup shows up first. The PC just uses the first one in the table so everything goes over the dial up. If I remember correctly winipcfdg will tell you which one it wants to use as the default.

The only way I know which might make the dialup's default route go away would be to try (from a DOS window):
route delete 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 thegatewayofthedialup

even if this works you would have to do it every time and I expect that thegatewayofthedialup might change every time so it would be difficult but not impossible to automate.

Your best bet would be to get the application which likes to dialup to stop doing it or perhaps to kill the dialup connection as soon as it establishes. Can you tell us what it is? What happens if you pull the telephone line? Does it just refuse to work or does it eventually decide to use the better connection? Have you tried removing the dialup connection completely?

Ron

[Lance Brown]

Ron,

That???s why I suggested a router with DDR. You can specify a specific IP or a range that the dialup will take and all other traffic would go to the cable modem.

Another alternative would be to get the company to fix their software and make it connection independent.