Using 2 nics on server or not?

[rzandrew]

So i know a few things abut server setups but not that much.

Talking about server 2003.

Before i assumed that you would connect the router and server and clients to direct to the switch. And as for dhcp in this setup i think i assumed that you would set the server to supply all dhcp to the clients, would that mean that you would disable dhcp on the router?

But i came across a server setup that used 2 nics on the server, one nic connected to the router and the other to the switch, so hence everthing ran through that server.

So how would this 2 nic server most likley be setup, would the dhcp be running on the router to supply the "wan nic" and ip and also dhcp running on the server to supply the clients ips. Note that the nics were on different subnets.

So they had

router(192.168.1.1)-->wan nic server(192,168.1.2)-->server-->lan nic(192.168.16.2)-->client pcs(192.168.16.x)

to do this would you need to setup "routing an remote access" on the server?

I also noticed that the lan nic was set an ip of 192.168.16.2 so as to be a default gateway for the 192.168.16 subnet i think and it was also set a DG of 192.168.1.1 and a dns of 192.168.1.1

I am confused as to why the dns for the lan nic is the routers address, why send dns to the router, if you send dns requests to the router how do the lan clients resolve dns internally?

So basically are these the only two ways to setup a one server network, i.e either have two nics or one nic, or are there other ways?

thanks

 

[scaye]

To the first question you had: I'm unsure if that is a possible solution as I've never tried it that way. You could disable DHCP on the router, and give it a static LAN address. You might then be able to use the Routers LAN address as the gateway and dns addresses to get to the internet. This solution would probably mean static IPs for all computers on the network, as enabling DHCP on the server would kill getting out to the internet on the router.

The second solution is the way I've normally seen it done. As most use DHCP on the server to hand out addresses. The router must be connected to the server in the way you described. Subnets won't matter in this case, as the server is the only thing the router is serving an address. The server is then a whole new LAN, so the two cards can be on different subnets, and it was probably that way because they were subnetting past the server.

Normally you can put in the servers IP for both the Gatway and DNS, perhaps they had it setup different in winserver. I don't know much about what winserver can do.

Well you could have 3 or 4 nics =P