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Not as smart as it sounds
Authored by: avramd on Sep 01, '06 10:17:57AM

I just wanted to clarify for people who read this that there is no special magic going on here. Apart from some Rendezvous/Bonjour peripherals, OS X and Windows do the exact same thing, and OS X can not intelligently choose one connection over the other.

The only choice it can make is to look at the network address of the device you are trying to reach, and see if it is in a subnet that is directly connected to one of your non-primary interfaces. This is what all IP hosts have done since long before Mac OS 7 could even do TCP/IP. Beyond that it has to pick one default gateway as being the primary, and it uses it for everything.

The people describing these situations just happen to have a situation where everything they need to get to over their secondary interface actually is on the same subnet as that interface, and they do not need to go through any routers on that interface. OS X could run software to figure that out too, but it is not in there by default, and most network admins would hang you if you tried to get your computer to participate in their routing domains.

I love to tell people about how macs "just work" as much as the next guy, but in this case, Windows "just works" too.

The only thing that is special in this respect on the mac is the ability to swap out entire network configuration sets with the Location feature. That is great and windows can't touch it. But these days most networks have automatic addressing (DHCP), and you don't end up needing the Locations feature on them. Windows works just as well here. In both cases you sometimes need to poke the interface to get it to discover its new address, although I do find that the poking is required more often on Windows than on Mac.



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