IP Networking

I had the pleasure of having a gig nic given to me this week, which also appears on the hardware list of FreeBSD.

What I would LIKE to do is:
1). Set my 10/100 nick as the dedicated outside/internet connection with a lan ip of 192.168.1.100
2). Set the gig nick as the dedicated inside/lan connection with a lan ip of, eh, 192.168.1.(different number).

This is my home file server, and the gig nic I think would be better served for the lan then outside connections. Other then weekly remote backupus from a buisness machine, there is no trafic coming in to this box from the outside world.

This is what I think I should do:
BSD Guides :: Doing Stuff With FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, & Mac OS X

In other words, set an alias entry into my rc.conf for one of the nics.

But, here is where my questions are.
1). Which nick should be the primary? (internal lan or external internet). My guess is the primary address should be the internet nick.
2). Will both ip's/connections appear in my router? So that I can shut down all internet trafic to the one nic?
**** I'll be doing firewall rules here also.


I know, stupid questions...

Any and all help is greatly appriceated.

drool

Yeah, pretty basic questions. As for (1), sometimes you have dependencies that require an outside connection for things to work right, such as DNS lookups. For instance, your other servers might have DNS-addressable IP addresses and for your computer to boot, you need a service from one of those servers. Therefore, you either hardcode the IP/host entry in /etc/hosts, OR you set the NIC to boot up with the external interface fully configured. Other than that, which NIC is "primary" really doesn't matter.

Both IPs will not appear in your router. Only the external IP will. In fact, unless you set up your file server ALSO as a router, there's no need to do any special routing. Your internal addresses will be identified because of their subnet and IP range, and all other traffic will go through the "default" route, which will be on the same subnet as your external IP address.

Another take on this might be if you want the secondary nic and lan to be serviced through your bsd server. You might for example want to give the second nic an address within a different subnet (such as 192.168.2.xxx if your netmask is a class C --- 255.255.255.0 or just choose another address/mask combination such as 69.69.69.1/255.255.255.0). You would need to enable routing of this second nic to the outside world. Your clients on this new subnet would have default route set to be your bsd server. All of this also would assume you run a separate physical wire for the second nic to keep the traffic separate. There are also other benefits here if you want to for example to have your bsd server act as the dhcpd server for this secondary lan. Lastly, I am not sure about bsd but LINUX does offer the ability to masquerade so that you could have your bsd server act as the single access point to the outside world. Why do all of this? It does give you the ability to control traffic between your client workstations and the outside world if that is you end goal. The implication/downside is that your bsd server would need to kept online to service the secondary lan clients. Lots of options/fun to play with.