Windows

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My situation is very similiar. The web site is hosted on a dedicated line, seperated from our network. I have the web server connected to both networks.

When I disable the local network, the site runs fine. When enabled, it can't be accessed from the outside.

The site is running behind a low end firewall/router. DHCP is disabled, and all appropriate ports are being forwarded to the internal web server address 10.10.10.10.

I know the forwarding and router config is good b/c it works on it's own.

Any help would be appreciated, I'm stuck working this fine holiday weekend until I find and answer.

Thanks,

JD

Figured it out once after a little bit of troubleshooting.

What I have found regarding this situation is that Windows wants to communicate across 1 NIC period. It will accept connections from others, however, but It wants to have one as "Master." The one its wants to lock on to is the one that gives it Internet access. If your LAN has internet access it will use the one for the IIS, as soon as it is accessed by the LAN it will "stick" to the LAN NIC and forget about the NIC connected to IIS. You can verify that this is happening because you can access a network share on the server and open a web page on the server.

The trick is to make windows use the NIC mapped to the external IP as "master". This is do-able in 2 ways. The Hard way is to adjust the I/O adresses of the NICs so that the External IP one is enumerated first in the bios. The easier way is to physically swap the ethernet cables between NICs and swap the IP addresses.

This has the following effect: The first NIC loaded into BIOS, which windows prefers, is dedicated to communication through the external IP(IIS)for internet and LAN. Windows will use this until it gets a request from the 2nd NIC (a network share for example), at which point it will process the request then return network access to the Primary NIC.