Question Will referencing the IP address of a network card in Windows force traffic to that card

[CrispyBytes]

Hi,
I have a Win 10 Pro PC which I have setup up as a backup server.

I use WakeOnLan to wake the PC before running a Robocopy script to backup files.

The mobo has an onboard 1 Gbps wired network card and I have added a 10 Gbps PCIe card.

I tried for ages to get WakeOnLan to work with the 10 PCIe, but I could not get it to stay powered during sleep (tried every Windows, drivers, BIOS tip that I could find).

However, the onboard 1 Gbps card does stay powered, so I have cables to both of the cards, and call the onboard IP address to wake the PC, and then use the PCIe IP address in the robocopy script, for example:

robocopy D:\SOURCE_FOLDER \\192.168.1.X\BACKUP_FOLDER

So, I am trying to use the onboard card just to wake the PC and the 10 Gbps PCIe card for the copying process.

What I would like to check, is whether doing this will actually force the network traffic over the PCIe card?

Can anybody please advise?

The mobo is a - MSI PRO B550M-VC WiFi ProSeries
The PCIe network card is - TRENDnet TEG-10GECTX

Both the cards are plugged into a Zyxel switch, which is then daisy chained to another Zyxel switch (which also has the router plugged into it). Both Zyxel switches are just the out of the box settings.

The router is set to assign fixed IP addresses to the two network cards.

 

[kanewolf]

Hi,
I have a Win 10 Pro PC which I have setup up as a backup server.

I use WakeOnLan to wake the PC before running a Robocopy script to backup files.

The mobo has an onboard 1 Gbps wired network card and I have added a 10 Gbps PCIe card.

I tried for ages to get WakeOnLan to work with the 10 PCIe, but I could not get it to stay powered during sleep (tried every Windows, drivers, BIOS tip that I could find).

However, the onboard 1 Gbps card does stay powered, so I have cables to both of the cards, and call the onboard IP address to wake the PC, and then use the PCIe IP address in the robocopy script, for example:

robocopy D:\SOURCE_FOLDER \\192.168.1.X\BACKUP_FOLDER

So, I am trying to use the onboard card just to wake the PC and the 10 Gbps PCIe card for the copying process.

What I would like to check, is whether doing this will actually force the network traffic over the PCIe card?

Can anybody please advise?

The mobo is a - MSI PRO B550M-VC WiFi ProSeries
The PCIe network card is - TRENDnet TEG-10GECTX

Both the cards are plugged into a Zyxel switch, which is then daisy chained to another Zyxel switch (which also has the router plugged into it). Both Zyxel switches are just the out of the box settings.

The router is set to assign fixed IP addresses to the two network cards.

WOL doesn't require an IP address. You might be able to put a fake IP address on the 1GE card. Let's say your network is 192.168.1.x and the 10GE card is 192.168.1.100. Your other computer is 192.168.1.99. You put a static IP address of 192.168.99.1 on the 1GE card so that the traffic on the 192.168.1.x subnet HAS to use the 10GE card. I don't think you want both the 10GE and 1GE cards to have 192.168.1.x IP addresses. Windows would get confused.

 

[CrispyBytes]

Thanks Kanewolf.

It's been a few weeks since I got the current setup working, so I can't remember exactly what I tried with WOL.

I am using NirSoft WakeMeOnLAN, and I seem to remember that I had to use an IP address to get it to work (although that might have been because my VPN software, NordVPN, sometimes messes up the DNS for PCs on my local network, and Split Tunneling to work around it is also patchy).

My understanding of your recommendation is that I put a static IP on the 1GE card, which is not on the 192.168.1.X subnet, and therefore force any 192.168.1.X subnet traffic onto the 10GE card.

The problem I think I will have with that is that I need to use the 1GE card for WOL, because I cannot get the 10GE to stay powered on to accept the WOL packet. Even if I use the PC name rather than the IP address, I guess that the 1GE would not be used as it would not be on the 192.168.1.X subnet.

I can certainly give it a spin, but just wanted to check that is what you meant.

 

[bill001g]

Why don't you use the windows low power options so you can just leave the machine on all the time. The difference in power usage is almost nothing and wake on lan tends to be very flaky even when it works.

Too many app developers that were born after everything was web browser based. They have little to no concept of how things work at very low levels. Wake on lan does not use IP addresses only mac addresses. The confusion is mostly all the apps that were improperly written using IP addresses . Part of this is people trying to do Wake on WAN which does not exist and can not work with most consumer routers....even though people think it does since it will work for short periods of time. Again writing apps without real understanding on how networking works.

So in your case all you really would have to do is plug both nic into a switch and then send the wake packet to the mac address of the 1gbit interface. The only issue I would see is windows is going to be too smart and ask for a IP address for both nics when the OS boots. You now have 2 nics on the same network. In theory at least windows should decide that the 10gbit nic is faster so it will send all traffic on that one and ignore the 1gbit nic. What I would do instead is put some random network like 192.168.200.x on the 1gbit interface that way it never gets a IP on the main network and since it is a dummy network you are not using it will never have traffic sent to it.

My prediction though is wake on lan is going to be very intermittent. A large part of this is microsoft and all there low power garbage that can override the bios settings. So many motherboard bios makers support some of the proprietary microsoft power/sleep options it is even hard to get setup even when the os you are going to boot is linux.

Again I would try to just use the sleep/low power modes. If it has to be "off?" I would use the boot on power restore option and use one of the fancy power plugs to force the boot.