Question : how do you configure dual gateways on dual NICs under win2k3 ?

Hi
I have a very frustrating issue with win2k3 network configuration.
I have a dell PE1950 server with dual nics. 1 nic is on address 192.168.10.10, mask 255.255.255.0 default gateway 192.168.10.1 ( the cisco firewall vlan address) this interface is 1:1 natted from an external internet address.
The 2nd nic is on 192.168.210.10 mask 255.255.255.0 default gateway 192.168.210.1 (another vlan address on cisco firewall)
Both nics are on a l3 switch on different vlans and the .1Q trunk port going to the cisco firewall.

The first nic is to handle all external web traffic and be isolated from the internal data network. the 2nd nic carries all data from the internal servers.

Problem..... intermittiently good old win2k3 drops one of the gateways. it maybe a hour a day a week before it does this. I understand that win2k3 only likes to have 1 default gateway (after I have dug around) but can you use persistant routing to force 210.0 traffic out of the other nic rather than using the default gateway. I have tried setting up routes but nothing seems to work.

if I re-add the gateway address after windows drops it - everything works again.... for while.

I'm sure you can do this or are dual nics just for redundancy rather than true split networking ?

Many thanks in adanve

Answer : how do you configure dual gateways on dual NICs under win2k3 ?

I think I have got round the problem by adding a few persistant routes for all internal traffic.

This process is not a bug within win2k3 but conforms to the rfc. In linux / unix environements there is more flexibility as to the configuration of multiple NICS.

Windows server does not disjoint NICS under the OS, rather it decides which gateway to use (if there are more than 1) after calculating traffic flows.

Problem now sorted but thanks to all who helped and good luck to those planning multihomed networks under windows server

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