Problem :
My PC is connected to a WIFI access point to access internet. That is working fine. Now, I have connected an embedded system (say a router) to my PC using an ethernet cable. Now I am able to ping external addresses like google.com etc. as well as my embedded system’s ip (192.168.1.1) from a command prompt. So, basically my PC is using both the interfaces successfully. I am able to browse any external website as well as the embedded system’s admin login page from IE.
But Chrome is only able to browse external websites, it is not able to access the embedded system’s login page. I think – Chrome is trying to use the WIFI network interface for accessing the page and hence fails.
How can I force chrome to use the ethernet interface when I try to access the login page (192.168.1.1)?
Please note, when I disconnect the WIFI from my PC, the chrome can access the embedded system’s login page successfully.
Solution :
I use to do something similar and had to modify my PC’s routing table to get it working correctly. If your wired IP is 192.168.1.25 and your wireless IP is 123.123.123.123, then you’d want to use these commands to set your computer to route traffic over the correct interface. (Your command prompt needs to be in Administrator mode.)
route add 192.168.1.1 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.25 metric 2
route delete 0.0.0.0
route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 123.123.123.123 metric 5
The first entry sets the embedded system to use your wired connect, and all other traffic goes over WiFi. A few caveats with this though. Your interfaces will likely have base metric values already associated with them. Run route print after your done and make sure that the metric for 192.168.1.1 is lower than the metric for your default (0.0.0.0) route. If it’s larger you may need to increase the metric of the default route.
This will also reset each time you start Windows. That’s good for testing but you’ll want to include the -p flag to make the route permanent. Just don’t forget about it if you move to a new network.
route add -p 192.168.1.1 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.25 metric 2
Keep in mind that if something is using an IP in 192.168.1.1/24 on your wireless connection you won’t be able to access it. You can always dial down the subnet mask of your embedded system route to help with that.
Pretty odd behaviour.
The only way I know of doing this is with a downloadable application called ForcebindIP .
Paste it in your system32 folder and run:
ForceBindIP %IPofethernetinterface% %PathofChrome%