Selecting a preferred interface

[Monafly]

I have laptops with docking stations that have end up having both wired and wireless internet connections. RS is can only back up over the wired connection (wireless IP's are dynamic). Sometimes RS will register that one of these machines is on the wireless rather than wired connection and thus won't back up. I can turn off the wireless connection and then things are fine, but that's inconvenient for users to remember to do this. 

 

How can I force RS to only recognize or always use the wired connection? 

 

Thanks. 

[billraab]

I had a similar issue but I allow backing up over wireless as well as ethernet. The problem being I wanted ethernet to have the priority if both were active. What worked for me was to make all ethernet connections have a static IP (eg 192.168.1.111) and not use DHCP. Wireless can still use DHCP but not ethernet. From what I have seen Retrospect chooses to use the ethernet if this is how things are set up here. However when I was using DHCP on the ethernet connections it was a cr@pshoot as to what Retrospect would use for backing up. More often than not it chose the wireless connection. That is until I had static IPs implemented on the ethernet connection. I hope that helps.

[Don Lee]

It seems to me that you could use the topology of your network, if Retro allowed the specification of which network subnet to search, which it appears not to do......

[Monafly]

It used to be back the 6.x days (IIRC) that the client could be bound to a particular NIC which of course would solve this problem, but I see no way to do that anymore. This is a Windows machine and I'm more a Mac person, so perhaps theres a way in the newer OS's (Win 7) that I don't know about. 

 

The DHCP trick won't work, because, while the machine has a static IP (which it gets from DHCP here on campus), I can't give it a fixed address, because when it's taken home and connected there via wired, the IP would be invalid. 

[macpro]

... I can't give it a fixed address ...

You could via the DHCP server. 

When the computer is at your network, the DHCP server will always assign it the address you want.

When the computer is at home, the DHCP server over there will assign it another IP address.