mjhjmtu

I have need to attach the two robotic devices to my computer, and for this I would like to use the two network cards connecting to these different pieces of hardware. Both devices happened to use the same network (ip addresses 10.0.0.70 and 10.0.0.21, netmask 255.255.255.0 in both cases).

I have discovered that if I configure and put up the network of any single card, it works no problem: I can ping the robotic device, and I have all other connectivity to it. However as soon as I put the second card up, only one of the two is working. I tried to given the main computer different IP addresses, tried to give the same, makes no difference. I tried to specify IP address of the host computer as the gateway, different for each card, the same, no difference at all. Even ping does not work on one of the cards when both are up, and even if I specify when pinging which interface to use.

My kernel is 4.15.0-39-generic #42~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 24 17:09:54 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux.

Both network cards can work together if I assign them to the different networks. However it would be preferred not to change the network settings on the side of the robotic devices. I do not need to route packets between these two cards.

Here is the working configuration I got:

enp3s0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 18:d6:c7:00:d9:3e 
 inet addr:10.0.1.30 Bcast:10.0.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
 RX packets:16929681 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
 TX packets:56504 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
 RX bytes:1219898415 (1.2 GB) TX bytes:5267812 (5.2 MB)

enp6s0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 18:d6:c7:01:69:35 
 inet addr:10.0.0.22 Bcast:10.0.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
 inet6 addr: fe80::1ad6:c7ff:fe01:6935/64 Scope:Link
 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
 RX packets:52316 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
 TX packets:16935487 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
 RX bytes:4325056 (4.3 MB) TX bytes:1220948325 (1.2 GB)

It stops working as soon as I change the IP of the first device to 10.0.0.30 (and broadcast address changes into 10.0.0.255).

I have just tried under Kali Linux live distribution, even there it does not work. Under Kali Linux

ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.21 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
ifconfig eth1 10.0.0.70 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

Again, I would expect that at least ping -I should work but nope, to ping any one, another must be down. How can any simple switch have multiple physical ports connected to the same network and a large computer cannot?

As the robot devices have a different IP, the simplest way would be to create a Linux bridge with the two ethernet interfaces as ports. Something along the lines of

ip link add name br0 type bridge
ip link set enp3s0 master br0
ip link set enp6s0 master br0

Then set a single IP address on the internally facing br0 interface:

ip addr add 10.0.0.1/24 dev br0

and you should be good to go, without a switch hanging out of the tail of the box, but everything still on the same network.

And please, please, don't use Kali Linux for such things. Read this, and do yourself a favour and switch to some distro (Debian-based, as Kali is also Debian-based) that is intended for daily work. You will run into a lot less trouble. And all the shiny tools Kali has can also be installed.

By default, Linux's IP protocol driver uses an optimization that has the technical name of "weak end system model" or "weak host model". See this question for more details.

What it boils down is, when you configure two NICs with IP/netmask combinations that belong to the same block of IP address space, the code that is responsible for routing of outgoing IP addresses will assume it means both those NICs are connected to the same physical network segment, and therefore either of them can be used to talk to any host that has IP address in that block. And then it just uses the interface that happens to be listed first in the routing table for all outgoing traffic to that network segment. It does not have the concept of multiple distinct physical networks using copies of the same IP address space.

If your system happens to have the reverse path filtering (/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/rp_filter) enabled, it might block you from pinging one of the robots even if you specify the network interface (say eth1): when the answer comes in through eth1, the reverse path filter sees that the normal routing to that source IP would go through eth0 and therefore this incoming packet on eth1 must be bogus. You can see if this is happening if you enable the log_martians setting:

for i in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/log_martians; do
 echo 1 > $i
done

Then attempt to ping your robots, and then check the end of the dmesg output: you might see messages about dropped packets.

Your situation would require the routing to take the source IP address into account when deciding which NIC to use for outgoing packets, and so to behave according to what is called "strong end system model" or "strong host model" instead. Well, Linux can do that using the "advanced routing" functionality, but it is definitely not the default, and is quite tricky to configure. See my answer in the above-mentioned question for a configuration recipe if you really want to do it.

However, since the IP addresses of the robots are not overlapping, the simplest solution in terms of software configuration would be to get a small cheap network switch (or even a hub) and plug both robots and one network cable from the computer into it.

Or if you want simplicity in terms of minimal amount of hardware, then just configure the robots to use different IP segments if you want to wire them directly to multiple NICs on the same computer.

For 21 and 70 you can use two nonoverlapping subnets 10.0.0.0/26 and 10.0.0.64/26 (/26 = mask 255.255.255.192). Assuming no other interfaces include 10.0.0.0/25.