Internal Private Networking on Windows

If you have asked us to create a private network for internal traffic this will be provided using DHCP. However, so the network is private it requires an internal gateway, which can disrupt outgoing connections from your VPS (as it will have 2 gateways).

To get around this issue on Windows you need to modify the NIC metric for the NIC that is connected to the private network.

First go to the properties of the new NIC and then highlight 'Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)' from the list and click on 'Properties'

Now click on the 'Advanced' button

Now uncheck 'Automatic Metric' and enter a value of 700 then click 'OK'

This will ensure that the second gateway the DHCP server has added does not override the primary gateway and you will be able to create outgoing connections without any issues.

This is not required on Linux operating systems.

Secondly, if you are using SQL Management Studio or anything else that does reverse DNS lookups when connecting to an IP, you may find that connecting to the local internal IP is slow (as there are no reverse DNS entries for local IPs). To get around this you can add an entry in the hosts file so that the local IP resolves to something. Generally adding "192.168.x.x localhost" to your hosts file will fix it (replace x.x with the local IP octets). The hosts file is found at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and can be edited with notepad when run as administrator.