WDS 2 network card setup

ally_uk

Hi guys,

I have a box with two network cards, the first will be connected to work network.

The 2nd one I want to connect it directly to a switch and then any clients that access this switch can in theory can run px e and run WDS.

Is this possible?

Go easy on me guys I'm a networking Windows server noob...

Nik 99

I did answer the other thread below that basically asked the same question =P But yeah you can. Important point I can think of. Do you need internet access on the clients network? If yes then A) connect your router to the clients switch (hopefully your using a good router with more then 1 IP interface). Or setup routing on that server 2016 box and it can pass the traffic over to your main router. Can't really recommend this one cuz it seemed kinda complex the only time I looked at it lol. Setting up the networking should be pretty painless. WDS on other hand....pluralsight vids for mcsa 411 didn't make it look easy or strightforward.

ally_uk

Don't need internet access on the clients but technically this could be done right by using NAT? I'm not a network genius... So that might be wrong.

I just want a way to have the 2nd nic isolated. Reasoning is

Main network one router handling DHCP for the whole building.

PXE server is already on the network, The network is on one subnet for the whole building. Thinking about it this is a area that could be improved. Vlans? I'm not a networking guru and we currently do not have a network admin lol. PXE server is currently running a serva32/64 setup hosting Windows ISO files and tools such as pc check.

So yeah initially looking at the WDS I was like well it requires PXE and a DHCP server if I went ahead it would clash with the current setup. Hence my need for isolation.

I've heard of dnsmasq, chainloading, dhcpproxy. But I am a noob and need a mentor or somebody to break these concepts down into plain english.

Nik 99

Pretty safe bet your router is already using NAT so you don't need an additonal NAT setup. That would be double NAT and thats just painful.

Yeah you could use vlans. Then you'd seperate things via switchports. Say for example having vlan 10 between ports 10 - 20 and vlan 20 for ports 21 - 30 ect. whatever you require. Still need a vlan capable switch and router to get that up and running. Your router could even allow selected traffic to go between vlans using access control lists.

Something I'm not entirely clear on. Why don't you just use a router interface to give yourself another network?

Don't know anything about dnsmasq or chainloading, never heard of them so apprently I'm a noob too lol. I'm assuming dhcpproxy is just dhcp relay which isn't anything too complex. Can't your router have seperate dhcp processes per network interface? For example I'm running pfsense in a lab with LAN1, LAN2 and LAN3. Pfsense lets me have a unique dhcp instance for all 3 of the lan's with different ip addressing, dns servers, masks and default gateways, ect.

ally_uk

Router is pretty basic the ports are already being used lol

I'm going to try the two network card WDS setup not sure if it would work? How would I tell the DHCP service to bind to the 2nd interface ( isolated network)

Nik 99

hmm, good question. Best guess is this:-

NIC 1
172.16.0.1 mask 255.255.0.0

NIC 2
172.17.0.1 mask 255.255.0.0

DHCP scope
172.17.0.10 - 172.17.0.50 mask 255.255.0.0

So in this case your not specifically configuring it via interfaces. Instead it will only work for the 172.17.0.0 network, which NIC 2 is part of in this case.

Edit: If you happen to have anything with around 8 - 16 GB ram you could just grab a trial version of server 2016 and setup some vm's in vmware workstation to test your setup. No worry about breaking anything that way.

ally_uk

That sounds interesting doing things virtually forgive me is this is a silly question. But how would I replicate the physical setup virtually i.e have a switch and the second vm I want to boot via pxe uses the 2nd virtual nic. I'm confused never really have done anything like this. Thank you for assistance.

Nik 99

Not a silly question. Depends on what your using for your virtualization. For instance in hyper V you create virtual switches and assign VM's to that switch. For vmware workstation you goto edit VM settings > network adapter. Change the connection type to custom and and place your vm's into the same VMnet in order for them to communicate with each other. Adding a second virtual NIC that is part of another VMnet will give it access to both virtual networks.