Using WiFi card to connect to the Internet and NIC card to connect to the local network

Recently we had internet outage in our office. I had to do something very urgently for one of our clients and this required internet connection. I quickly recalled that my HTC Desire can act as a WiFi access point and so I turned it on, successfully connected my laptop to it while keeping Ethernet cable hooked up to the NIC port and … nothing no internet.

I googled around and found that for as long as my Ethernet cable is connected to the NIC it would be preferred because it is higher speed connection. But in one of forums someone mentioned this term “Metric” that actually acts as a value that defines preference between all available connections. Also I found out that this metric can be arbitrarily assigned to a specific network interface. The lower the metric the greater is the preference.

The way one assigns it in windows xp is described here:
Configuring Multiple Adapters on the Same Physical Network

Using metric I made my wifi a preferred method of connecting to the net and whenever it could not find something on the net it tried looking it up using my NIC. Obviously resources that were only available on the internal network could not be available on the net and so lookups for internal resources would always fail on WiFi and would be routed via NIC instead. That’s all I really wanted.

Happy networking!