Question : Dual Nics?

Hello.  I have a server (win 2003) that needs to respond to external requests on a public IP address (apache webserver).  This would be a static ,public IP address provided by my T1 provider (Their router doesn't allow me to set up NAT for some reason).    I also have another router (linksys) connected to the T1 router.  I have that 2nd router giving out internal IP addresses (192.168.x.x) to the desktop machines on the network.   I need for the desktop machines to be able to access file shares on that apache server.   I was doing that by sharing off of the public address, but the desktop machines seem to randomly and frequently lose the connection to the share (I added static routes, but it didn't seem to help).    

So... I added a 2nd NIC to the server, connected it to the internal Linksys router and gave that 2nd NIC an internal address 192.168.x.x.  Different gateway on each NIC ('externa'l NIC uses the T1 router as the gateway, 'internal' NIC uses the linksys router as teh gateway).    This works great, except that after a while, the external IP seems to stop responding to port 80 or to external requests or something.  If I reboot it seems to help, but eventually fails again.    

Any suggestions??    Thanks!

Answer : Dual Nics?

You cannot have 2 gateways. As rule you normally assign the gateway to the external/public NIC and leave the other blank. If there is only the 1 subnet on the internal side you are fine. If there is a router in the internal side and it is connected to other subnets that you need to reach (does not sound like this is the case) you then have to add static routes for the additional subnets.

Using multiple gateways is governed by metrics. However, when it switches to the second gateway, it will not switch back, which likely why you are loosing the connection. Using dual gateways, is very unreliable and has unpredictable results.