can you tell windows which interface to use?

Hidy ho all,

I have an odd question for you all.

I have a virtual machine running pfsense. I was setting up a practice network, to brush up on my server knowledge (man, do I need that).

But I had an idea, to have pfsense handle my personal desktop traffic as well as the virtual network traffic. The only way I can think to let this happen is to create a virtual NIC, and tell windows to route all network traffic through that nic only. Then have pfsense bridge a connection to that virtual NIC, and the physical nic.

The only real obstacle to this, that I can see, is getting windows 8.1 pro to route traffic only through the NIC I define.

My question is, can this even be done?

 

Possibly...you would need to set the virtual nic's connections to 'bridged', that would place the host and the vm on the same subnet, give the incoming virtual nic a static ip, then if it allows it, create a custom route at the router that sends all traffic to the static ip, you would also create a static route on the host to send all traffic to the virtual nic's static ip address.
Never tried it myself but it might just work.

 

ok, trouble is, I don't have access to the router.

I'm on a domain network, and only have access to my local machine.

My current NIC setup is dynamic. I just want windows to send all traffic to a virtual NIC instead. I looked it up, there is a windows program that creates a loopback nic on the local machine. I just need to tell windows to only use that connection.

 

Through a patch panel in the wall, and jobs businesses router. I don't own it, I can't configure it.

what do you mean what type of domain? And, my paranoia is kicking in, why do you need to know my businesses domain?

 

OK if you are on a network that you do not control I don't see how you are going to get this done.
Even if you set a static route in windows to go directly to the virtual nic, it might work for outgoing traffic, but not for inbound traffic going to the host machine. Well...you could try to change the DNS settings on the host so that the virtual nic's ip is listed as the default gateway. OK now my head hurts...good luck with this project.

 

as far as I know, I'm not violating anything. the goal is to get a firewall between me and the network connection, but not break network connectivity or stop the flow of information between this machine and the network.

I still want to log onto the domain, give people access to my machine, and still have access to the network resources.

If anything, I'm adding a bit of security. Because, if I can pull this off, I can show this off to my bosses and show them how I did it. that way, if they like, they can do the exact same thing on the server and and another layer of security to the network as a whole.

Edit: by software, do you mean the os its running

 

ok, I hope I don't get yelled at for double posting. And this is more for people watching this thread then anything.

it turns out that bridged network connections made by virtual machines get their own ip. I just tested this by giving my nic a static ip no where near the network connections, and the virtual network I had running, didn't loose internet. so, wew!

Now, I have to figure out how to get a virtual NIC to run on windows. The loop back interface didn't seem to do the trick.