Wired network, with some nodes that need to switch to wireless for internet

Question

I have a mini network cabled together on a gigabit switch (not linked to internet), with a few nodes which have wireless for internet too. Problem is, large files need to be transferred between PC's, and they are going over the wireless and not the wired. Is it just a case of setting the wired network PC's to a different IP range, so they can still see each other, but when they need internet, use their own wireless? I don't have it in my budget to get them all new wireless sticks, so obviously the 56 Mbps is way too slow for files.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Is there a router on your cabled network? Your file transfer traffic is going through the wireless because most likely that's the only route that your PCs know, to get to one another.

To achieve what you are looking to do, you first will need a Router, configure your PCs to connect to it accordingly. Then look into configuring your Ethernet NIC to use a higher metric than the USB stick.

That should tell your computer to use the USB stick for internet and Ethernet for everything else.

Presuming your PCs are running Windows, the options you are looking for should be listed under Local Area Network Connection -> Properties -> Internet Protocol Version 4" -> Properties -> "Advanced".

Answer 2

I'd consider a few things

1) turn on AP isolation on your wireless router if available- this keeps wired connections from seeing wired connections and vice versa

2) If you're using windows file sharing you can turn it off per adaptor on windows. With samba you can play with hosts allow/hosts deny/bind interfaces - edit the block that looks something like this - via the samba docs

[global]
    #  Networking configuration options
    hosts allow = 192.168.220. 134.213.233.
    hosts deny = 192.168.220.102
    interfaces = 192.168.220.100/255.255.255.0 \
                    134.213.233.110/255.255.255.0
    bind interfaces only = yes

You can do similar things on both ends for other protocols

3) explicitly use ip addresses in conjunction with per-program interface binding so you can control precisely what both ends of the connections are, otherwise