Wireless NIC and Wired NIC with same static IP questions.

[Chris Reed]

I have a pc i run a few game servers on, and i have recently installed a wireless NIC into it so I can move it to my big screen in the living room for bigger lan parties. I have the pcs IP set to static so clients never have to worry about changing ip info as well as me not having to have all my ports forwarded to two ips. This would make it harder to save all the port rules. Router has limited amount of rules I can save. So basiclly. I would like to set it so both the NICs are using the same static ip i have set to my port rules. Obviously id need to make sure the wireless is disabled when i plug into the ethernet cable, but is this even possible?

 

[hang-the-9]

Sure, you can set as many cards as you want to the same IP, only issue you'll have is IP conflicts and unreliable network if both cards are enabled.

 

[Chris Reed]

Sure, you can set as many cards as you want to the same IP, only issue you'll have is IP conflicts and unreliable network if both cards are enabled.

It appears my conflict is going to be in the router itself now. Its not letting me assign the same ip to two different mack addressess.

 

[bill001g]

It will never let you do it with DHCP you will have to manually assign the ip in the network driver on the machine itself. You will likely still get warnings about duplicate addresses if the device is actually active when you try to assign the IP.

Be aware even if you get this to work the router will still for a short period of time have the wrong mac address mapped to the the IP in the ARP table. This generally clears pretty quickly but it is not like you can switch back and forth and not expect disruptions.

The only way I would think you could try to use DHCP is to assign the MAC address of the wireless card to the ethernet card in the nic settings. Most wireless nic cards you can not change the mac address but almost all wired ethernet ports you can change it. Hopefully windows is not too smart for its own good and prevents you from doing this.

If you would manage to get both the ethernet and the wireless active at the same time with the same mac address I have no clue how bad things would be but it would cause massive issues.