Two-Interface System

From Ndiyo

Sometimes you may want to isolate the Nivos from the rest of your network. Here are some reasons why you might want to do that:

• Your main network is wireless, but the Nivos use wired connections.
• You wish to keep the Nivos on a network of their own for performance or security reasons.
• You need to give the Nivos static IP addresses, but do not have the ability to set that up on your main network.

One way to do this is to install two network interfaces in the PC driving the Nivos. It uses one interface to talk to the Nivos, and another - which may be ethernet, wireless, a satellite link, a DSL modem, a mobile phone, or even a dialup connection - to talk to the rest of the world.

Here's what it might look like if both interfaces are ethernet connections:

Note that in this scenario, you'll need to give a static IP address - 192.168.200.1 - to ethernet interface eth0, and you'll also need to run a DHCP server on the PC to provide 192.168.200.* addresses to the Nivos.

It's worth remembering that, in this scenario, only the pixels are going over the 192.168.200 network. All the applications are running on the PC and will have access to the outside world through interface eth1, so you don't need to make any special arrangements for web browsers, for example, to allow them to access the outside world.