I am soon to have 2 separate internet connections in my home (one cable and one adsl). What I am wondering is if my 2 main macs can use separate internet connections and still have a local LAN together.

I would assume I need 2 ethernet on each system. My only option then would be to use airport and ethernet on my mini then add an ether. PCI card to my Sawtooth G4.

As far as I know a router can only use 1 connection. Any advice or help is greatly appreciated.

anyone???

you have a fine quandary on your hands. I think the answer is "not possible", so thats why id didnt respond (maybe i just dont know how to do it). Anyways, haven't senn you around much recently have i? good to have you back.

Google "Load Balancer" and I think you should go that route

Yeah its possible, if you want to stay on the same network and but keep the computers using the separate network connections. I find that usefull if you like to keep one working hard downloading stuff 24/7 but still want to use the other for everday surfing without slowdown. The easist way (perhaps not the most efficeient though) to do it is to use two routers set them both up to connect up as normal for the adsl and cable (they don't need to be the same model or manufacturer)

1) Configure one to use an ip of 192.168.0.1, and the other to use an ip of 192.168.0.10 (basically any 2 IPs on the same subnet but not identical)

2) Turn of DHCP off on at least one router. If you leave DHCP enabled on a single router then that router will supply any new computers on the network with an IP address and they will access the net through that router, its not a problem to do it this way though. Also make sure that if you leave DHCP turned on one router that it does not hand out the IP of the second router or the macs to a new machine on the network. Their should be an option for start and end address on the router, just make it start at 192.168.0.50 and end at 192.168.0.254.

2) Connect the routers together (you may need to use a cross over ethernet cable for this bit, it depends on how cleaver your routers are at working it out)

3) Configure 1 mac (say the mini) to use an IP address of 192.168.0.11 and a dns server of 192.168.0.1 or your ISPs DNS server, give it a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and a default gateway of 192.168.0.1
Configure the 2nd mac with an IP address of 192.168.0.12 and a dns server of 192.168.0.10 a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and a default gateway of 192.168.0.10

4) Connect both macs to a router it doesn't matter which one, but file transfers will be marginally quicker if they are both plugged into the built in switch of a single router.

Thats it, sit back and feel smug!

Obviously this doesn't combine your bandwidth, but each mac can't steal the others bandwidth, if you wanted to do that, you will have to investigate load balancing solutions, and that is significantly more complicated, and its far past my ability to explain I'm afraid.

One final caveat is that you would have to manually swap settings over if your net connection failed on either of your services.

Hope that gives you some idea its not to bad but you will have to spend a little bit of time and money to get it working as I've described it, their are other ways which are cheaper but this is slightly more flexible, any questions I'll do my best to answer.

Hmm sorry managed to double post that by accident. I've removed the second post

Post edited by: burtman, at: 2005/12/27 16:11

I was going to say use a VPN connection. Burtman's idea seems better.