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Two Internet Connections - One Network - How To Manage

Server Fault Asked by Testing Nuwani on January 14, 2021

Here is my situation. Im not a network expert so sorry if I’m not explaining this correctly.

In my company, we have two separate internet connections from different ISPs. Both the routers are connected to a Switch.

We have two windows servers (2019) for the proxy and the file server. (Assume there is no proxy server or firewall installed right now and suggest me a good proxy and a firewall for my purpose)

There are 65 client machines (running windows 7 & 10) on each floor of the company that has given static IPs (192.168.1.X). All three floors of the company have separate switches that connect client machines of each floor

What I want is to give access to a range of IPs to a certain ISP and limit their web accessibility through the proxy server or the firewall. Then give another range of IPs to the second ISP with some web filtering.

Hope you understood the situation. Please help me to get a solution for this.

One Answer

This is fortunately not that hard to solve. Let's say we define the following: ISP_A and ISP_B being your two ISPs and CLIENT_NET_A (192.168.1.0/24) and CLIENT_NET_B (192.168.2.0) being the two different subnets in your office. Then what you could do to achieve what you want is this:

  • Set up a router that has an address on both CLIENT_NET_A and CLIENT_NET_B, say 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.1.1.
  • The router should also have connections to ISP_A and ISP_B. Not every router out there will do this nicely, but Mikrotik and many others will work for this kind of setup
  • Setup NAT on the router so traffic going coming from CLIENT_NET_A goes to ISP_A and correspondingly for CLIENT_NET_B
  • Still on the router, add a route from CLIENT_NET_A to CLIENT_NET_B if you want clients on the two subnets to able to communicate with each other
  • Assign static IP addresses to the clients you want to be part of CLIENT_NET_A and CLIENT_NET_B, making sure to assign default gateway matching the correct subnet

You should probably also add a DHCP server to your setup so you can assign addresses to guests and you might even want to assign IPs to your clients via DHCP too - you would have to register each client's MAC address in the DHCP though.

With respects to the firewall, you might want to add a drawing to improve understanding of your setup.

That should cover it from a very top down view. If you need help with the specifics, you can easily find it online. While not entirely standard, your setup is not that different from a lot of other stuff out there.

Answered by MrMajestyk on January 14, 2021

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