Dual Wifi for Remote Access

Greetings all,

Like a lot of facilities, ours has a plant-wide wifi connection for internet access on the floor, etc. And like a lot of people, I am using wifi to connect to my equipment for programming and troublshooting. Each of my machines has it's own wireless router, so connecting is as simple as changing my wifi connection from SSID "PlantWifi" to "Mill5", and I can connect without cables or opening doors.

Now I've got a new challenge - I need to be able to remote into my laptop to help maintenance troubleshoot if I am not in the building. I can remote into my laptop as long as it is on "PlantWifi", but lose my connection once I tie into "Mill5" (no internet to the machines)

So my thought was to bind my laptop internal adapter to "PlantWifi" for remoting, then use a second USB wireless adapter to connect to "Mill5". Turns out this is a lot more challenging than I thought it would be. Windows 7 wants to route everything across one or the other, and it seems there is little control for this.

Options I've considered -

1. IP filtering in the laptop - the machine networks have a small range of IPs in common within their own setups, so force traffic with that IP across the USB nic.

2. Sandboxing or a virtual machine to allow programming software access to only see the USB nic, but that seems like a lot of overhead.

3. Been seeing programs online like ForceBind, but apparently that would somehow hack the programming software (insert hooks, they call it) to restrict it to the USB nic, not very comfortable with that idea. Also, these utilities all seem pretty old and unmaintained.

For the record, connecting them all to factory LAN is not an option.

So my question is, has anybody here done something like this? And if so, what did you use to pull it off?


Thanks,

TM

Are the IP ranges common between the Plant Network and your machine networks? Hoping the answer here is no...

The answer is "no". The machines use a small range of IP addresses that start with 192.168.x.x. The plant wifi is DHCP, but assigns something wonky, like 205.248, etc etc

Well, at long as the IP ranges are different, it should route the 192.168.x.y traffic across the machine Wifi...
Unless there IS a 192.168x.y network that the Plant wifi can talk too, then the gateway gets involved and screws things up.

The other caveat is that you cannot have 2 different gateways, the Machine Wifi connection should not have a gateway address in place.

Set the IP on the machine NIC manually and don't assign a gateway to that NIC. Have worked for me in the past

Thanks, I'm testing this afternoon, I'll let you know how it goes!

Well, that was less painful than I thought.

I installed the wireless USB adapter and it appeared in the network manager as "Wireless Adapter 4". It has it's own listing in the Windows 7 wifi manager, and can select every network independently.

So for laughs, I left my laptop wifi on "PlantWifi" and selected one of my machine networks, and boom - I was in. Well, not quite boom, it's fairly slow, but it worked. I used my phone to remote to the laptop and was able to manipulate everything. On top of that, I could still reach the internet and get email.

For my next trick, I'll set up some wireless profiles with fixed IP addresses and see if that improves the speed any.

Thanks for the tips!