Normally I either have my laptop on wired or WIFI. They are different networks.
Because of the hot weather I have been using WIFI a lot outside and had set
XWLan to restore the wireless state on start up.
Now I am back inside and, without thinking, wired up the laptop as usual. I use
plug keyboard/mouse/Screen/ethernet when in my den.
Now because of the problems mentioned before in this group with regard to
switching NICs and issues with file & print I always assign a dummy address to
the NIC not in use.
Now my desktop is connected to both networks and has "ipgate on" Its IP's are
81.187.184.98/255.255.255.248 and 192.168.0.2/255.255.255.0
Once the laptop has booted and XWLAN done it's thing I get on the "unused" NIC
on the 81 net 192.168.200.250/255.255.255.0 and the wifi nic
192.168.0.49/255.255.255.0
Now the odd part. If I do something that requires file & print, for example a
directory list on a shared drive, it uses the 81 net - and it works. Now the
wired 81 net will get initialised first on an 81 address at boot. Then XWLan
comes along reassigns the NIC to 192.168.200.250 and inits the wifif card.
*Then* I login to the LAN which gets the shares going. I can't see either why
it does what it is doing, nor, more importantly, *why* it actually works.
?????