I have a Debian server which I would like to connect to 2 routers. One to access the internet and the other to be available to other devices on my LAN. The server will use a lot of bandwidth which isn't possible via the router on which my other devices are connected (ISP limitations) so I want internet traffic to go via another router which also is a WAP and functions as a hotspot.
You can see my setup in this image: http://i.imgur.com/Tw39xXG.png

Device1 & 2 (in the image) should be able to connect to my server via router2 and any requests I make with my router to access devices outside of my LAN (=internet) should go via router1.

Somebody here who can point me in the right direction on how to make this possible?

The "default gateway" setting on the Debian server determines where the server will send traffic destined for non-local networks.

Make sure there's only one gateway setting on the Debian box, and that it points to Router1.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for your answer. Would I need to setup a second routing table to do this?

No, alternate routing tables are only used for policy routing. All you need to do, is to configure the network interfaces and point the default route to Router1.

Tried setting the gateway for eth0 (interface to router2) to 10.117.x.x (ip of default gateway for wlan0) and then ifup wlan0 eth0. This doesn't work

Gateways are not set per interface, they are set per routing table, of which you have exactly one.

Several Linux distributions (and Windows) muddle the waters by having a gateway setting among the IP settings for each interface. If Debian does this, just leave the gateway setting under eth0 blank.

Hi

I'm not sure to understand exactly what you need. Do you want to configure your debian server to use Router2 as default route EXCEPTED if the queries come from Device1 and Device2, in that case, it must forward the packets through Router1 is that right ?

In that case, I would suggest :
- configure Device1 and Device2 default gateways to Router2
- on router2 configure a source route for every packets comming from Device1 and Device2 to forward it to the debian server
- on the debian server, configure the default gateway to Device1
- on the debian server, configure a source route for all packets comming from the LAN (excepted its own IP address), to be forwarded to Router1

You can configure source routing with iptables -t NAT

I didn't find the solution but I've decided to do things different. Thanks for the help anyway guys.