Dualling WiFi

[tmoulder]

Greetings all,

Not strictly a Visilogic question, but related.

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 Visilogic 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 Visilogic (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

[tmoulder]

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.