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Asked: 2026-05-31T22:59:28+00:00

As the question states, I have two ethernet devices I need to use. A

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As the question states, I have two ethernet devices I need to use. A wifi hotspot for general traffic as well as a LAN connection for local traffic (192.168.1.*). Right now the wifi receives all traffic and disregards the existence of my local LAN devices. I am trying to communicate with this device using python’s urllib2 and basic http fetches. The program works partially when I turn one or the other off (turning wifi off makes the LAN code work, and turning LAN off makes wifi/general traffic code work). I believe this is more of an operating system issue than a programming question, but I might be mistaken. I have been messing with the Ethernet setting in system preferences, but nothing has been working so far.

Thanks for the help.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Depending on your needs and degrees of freedom, you can:

    1) Easiest: If you can control one or both network ranges, you can put wifi and LAN on different subnets. For example, 192.168.2.* could be LAN traffic, and 192.168.1.* could be wifi. If only the WiFi side has a gateway, then all traffic except 2.* traffic should route through WiFi, and all 1.* traffic goes to the LAN. No change to your computer.

    2) Medium: if you don’t control the networks, you can define routing rules for the two ports. This lets you say certain IP addresses should be reached thru wifi, vs others thru LAN port. An example in Linux, which I think should work on OS X too: http://linux-ip.net/html/routing-tables.html The trickiest thing is to make sure you won’t get in the way when you’re in someone else’s network. You can do this by creating narrow routing rules, or turning them off when you don’t need them. It sounds like you’re doing this from a python program, so maybe the program could turn this on and off at start and finish.

    3) Slightly more exotic: I wasn’t totally sure from your question, but if you’re trying to do load balancing (not separate networks), you could create rules to bond together two network ports and spread traffic across them. This isn’t something I’ve done, but real network engineers know how to set this stuff up.

    I could expand on one of these if you clarify what you’re trying to do and what degrees of freedom you have.

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