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pablomedok
Asked: 2013-12-27 15:26:50 +0800 CST

Accept incoming connection from a second gateway

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I searched a lot about the question, but can't find solution for my situation.

We've got a Windows 2003 server that runs Advantage Database Server (ADS) through which our site connects to our accounting system. The site connects to static IP 82.xxx.xxx.147, runs several queries and disconnects. And does it every 5 minutes. Server has 2 NICs - one is for the site (192.168.5.1), another is for local network (192.168.0.1). Server connected to internet via ADSL modem/router (LAN IP 192.168.5.9), router's NAT is configured to forward port 45677 to the server.

Everything works fine, except for one thing - internet connection is not stable enough. So we got another ADSL connection with another IP address 178.xxx.xxx.181 and also forwarded that port to the server. Second modem/router's LAN IP is 192.168.5.3.

Our site is checking IP address 82.xxx.xxx.147 and if it's not responding, it tries another IP 178.xxx.xxx.181. But it doesn't connect. It looks like server rejects connections from the second router.

I tried to add second router's IP 192.168.5.9 as a second gateway in advanced TCP/IP settings of to server NIC's. But it doesn't help.

I understand, that it's something connected with routes, but I can't understand anything in those masks, metrics, gateway IPs. It's too tough for me.

I don't want the server to use any of the gateways for internet access (browser and other services). I just want it to receive incoming connections from both gateway IPs from fixed port number. Is that possible?

windows

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Unless I have misunderstood your design, which I believe could be described with less ambiguity:

    So your site has a really good internet connection. It connects to another place on the internet where your accounting is taken care of. This other place has two internet connections, one public address each, due to poor internet uptime. Both of these public addresses should be usable by your site to reach your accounting system on its local address. The accounting system has only one active default route which points to either but not both of its internet connection routers. It is unaware of the state of the routers.

    You could either go redundant appliance configured as a HA pair with (for example) internal VRRP set to failover on external link loss and dual WAN support, as stated in another answer.

    Or perform source address rewriting (aka Source NAT or snat), whereby your server will perceive that the client is a local address rather than a remote address. Therefore it will not use its default route to communicate with your site, but either of your snat:ing router interfaces (either the traffic came from 192.168.5.3 or from 192.168.5.9). This assuming that your routers are capable of doing snat on incoming connections.

    If they can't you could configure intermediary devices (one per router, default routing that-a-way) which can. This technique is commonly used by load balancers in order to short-circuit the default route which the internal server(s) would otherwise use, instead of replying through the load balancer(s) which one commonly wants.

    So if your routers aren't up to the task you could get cheap load balancers or use free software (two solutions in one link) as intermediaries. Or use state-of-the-art stuff, but somehow this seems like not that kind of scenario.

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  2. You need a server accepting incoming requests via 2 redunant routers with 2 WAN Interfaces. This is a typical HSRP/VRRP setup. One router will run as HSRP Active router, i.e. primary WAN for incoming and outgoing traffic. 2nd router will run as HSRP Standby router. There are 2 cases that will make a Standby router become the Active router, either when the Active router is Down, and does not respond to Standby router, OR, when Active router downgrades it's priority due to it's WAN link is Down. Now, about the default gateway, in order to work, HSRP gives you a Virtual Default Gateway IP Address, that you will configure on your server, which makes the dual router setup transparent to the server, i.e. server does not know that their are 2 routers running, as it is always using the virtual ip address for it's default gateway. The HSRP Active router always responds to the virtual IP. Look for HSRP/VRRP support on your routers. Check also the VRRP RFC http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc5798.

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