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You are here: MacNN Forums > Enthusiast Zone > Networking > Making certain connections "fall back" to other interfaces

Making certain connections "fall back" to other interfaces
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ibook_steve
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Nov 19, 2012, 04:29 PM
 
Here's my situation. At work, I connect ethernet to access the internal network for work. There is also a public wifi at work that allows access to external sites.

The problem is that if I have my interface order in Network preferences as ethernet and then wifi, I can get to internal stuff, but I can't browse externally. Web browsing requests presumably are trying to go through ethernet, from which I can't access external sites on my personal computer because of the company firewall/proxy.

If I switch the order, I get the exact opposite problem: I can get to external sites using the public wifi, but I can't access internal resources I need over ethernet.

Is there any way to direct particular services/applications to use a particular networking interface? For example, I want to use RDC to access internal machines through ethernet and my web browser should use wifi to access external web pages. I thought if one interface failed for a particular function, networking would fall back to other interfaces in my interface list in Network preferences, but maybe this doesn't happen.

Ideas?

Thanks,
Steve
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P
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Nov 20, 2012, 10:19 AM
 
You can add manual routing options using the command route in the terminal. Never used it myself, but a quick look at the man page suggests that what you are trying is possible.

EDIT: Some reading made my wonder... If you make the wired ethernet connection the preferred one, set the netmask manually to just the addresses you need internally, and then leave the router box empty, that would make any connection to anything other than your internal network fail directly. In that situation, the Mac should use the Wifi directly. Right?
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Waragainstsleep
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Nov 21, 2012, 11:58 AM
 
Seems like a weird set up. If they give you free wifi why won't they let you have internet over the wire too?
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
     
ibook_steve  (op)
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Nov 21, 2012, 10:08 PM
 
The "free" wifi is a public wifi for visitors to the company site. It is free and open and doesn't have any protection other than you have to get login and password info from one of our security desks. It has no access to internal company resources. There is actually an internal secure wireless network, but it has the same restrictions as the internal wired network, namely that non-company computers can't use it. Somehow, though, I can use remote desktop over the wired network to access my company laptop, so I can happily continue using my Mac while accessing internal stuff through remote desktop. The problem is that I want to go to the external web on my Mac, not on the company laptop.

For now, I've been getting around this by using Parallels Desktop. Parallels lets you create a virtual network interface via a physical interface. So what I've been doing is running remote desktop within Windows over the ethernet interface and then accessing external web on my Mac through a USB connection to my iPhone 4S with personal hotspot option. When I go through Parallels, I don't seem to have the network interface prioritization issue I mentioned in the first post. I don't know why. The problem with this setup, besides being overly complicated, is that my personal hotspot is really slow. I think my company's building is like a huge cell signal shield, because I get lousy service inside.

I know, this is all really weird. Over the last few years, due to one-off security breaches, my IT department has gone security crazy, blocking and closing up everything. They've removed admin access on all computers and even flash drive reading and writing! It's really annoying.

Steve
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