Private network between two hosts (VLAN?), multiple gateways

[Gentoo4Work]

Hello...

New to Gentoo, and glad to be part of a nice, clean world. Two questions re. networking will round off a nice, friendly solution to my workstation woes. Any help is much appreciated.

I have two boxes: one is a workstation running Windows 2008R2, the other is a workstation running Gentoo.

The Gentoo box is for heavy lifting, while the Windows box is for desktop use. Each machine has 4 NICs. The Windows box is capable of display on three monitors, so what I would like to do is connect the Gentoo box to the Windows box via direct LAN connection and use some variety of VNC to interact with it. In theory, VNC ran between two 10Gb NICs should be virtually without latency, thus eliminating the hassle of KVM. At least, that's my thinking. The other concern would be speed for using the Gentoo box to backup the Windows box. Do I establish some sort of private network between them? Set up Gentoo to act as an NIS server?

Somewhat relatedly, I have two different WAN subnets available to me: one is a static IP (my primary connection), and the other is a cable connection that I really only subscribed to because redundancy is cheaper than T1. However, the DSL is several orders of magnitude faster than the cable for uploads, and vice-versa for downloads. What's the best way to set this up, so that my Gentoo box can still communicate with the outside world via whichever ports are necessary, but the majority of non-server download traffic gets diverted to the cable pipeline?

Again, many thanks.

[nativemad]

Hi,

as you seem to have plenty of nics available, it would be probably the easiest way to just connect the two boxen with a crossed ethernet cable and assign a private subnet to them like 192.168.99.10 or something without specifying any gateway. (for VNC... but i would personally consider xming and xdmcp)

The other problem you've mentioned is a bit trickier.
You have to bear in mind, that you can't simply send uploads to another ISP than the downloads... You could do some sort of load balancing or you can define rules via iptables and iproute2 to direct to one or the other ISP.
http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html

First of all, i would do the cabling and subnetting (you will not need vlans!)
If you have routers (no locally ppp connection), then i would assign another private subnet to each of these and connect them to different nics on the gentoo-box. Like 192.168.10.0 and 192.168.20.0 for example.

Then you should still have one nic available on the linux box to create the common LAN (192.168.1.0 for example), where you can connect any box and act as router.

I would set up dnsmasq on gentoo for the dns and dhcp stuff and only let dhcp do its work on the common lan.

This is how i would do it... probably there are plenty of other ways!
_________________
Power to the people!

[Gentoo4Work]

Thank you for the thorough response.

This is for my home office, so the DSL actually sits behind a Cisco ASA, which does the majority of the basic work for that particular connection. The only problem there is that I have the crappy 5505 crippled by Cisco's obscene licensing terms. The cable modem is something I got first for the family, second to have the option of a fail-over if needed, but it goes through its own router... but switching the config on that won't be a problem.

Your comment about VNC is much appreciated, as I wasn't aware that there was an alternative. I've tried several different variations of VNC, and each time left me non-plussed and scratching my head, wondering how on earth there could possibly be so much latency (in terms of responsiveness) with a connection that was so low latency in terms of network topology. Xming/XDMC looks perfect for my needs though.

Cheers.