Setting up a network on WSL2 with a switch, while Windows communicates with local network

C. Crt

12/8/23, 11:16 AM

I took the liberty of reposting this question from SuperUser, because I think the thing that needs to be configured is Ubuntu on WSL2. Please tell me if it is not appropriate.

I need to set up a Windows 11 PC in a specific way, and our network engineer is unavailable. I dabble in networking but this is a bit complicated for me. What we need is to connect 7-8 homemade devices on a PC so they can communicate with WSL2 (using Hyper-V networking for instance), while the Windows side is connected to the local internet-capable network.

Here is a diagram of the network connection we need:

The PC will have a fixed address on the local network, like 192.168.X.X. This way, other machines from our lab can ping it and interact remotely. Meanwhile, each of the homemade devices (let's call them HD) has its own IP too, like 10.X.X.10, 10.X.X.11 ,10.X.X.12, etc.

Now, the very specific part that is causing me a headache: while the PC communicates with the local network, WSL2 needs to be able to communicate with the homemade devices.

More details & state of the art: on the PC, I have WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). It uses a Hyper-V virtual network switch to connect to the homemade devices. This is important, because all the software we need to use (data acquisition, analysis, etc) works on Ubuntu, and we use it from WSL2. The way we set this up is:

In Hyper-V settings, the network is set to "external", and to the USB adapter we have
In the "network connection" settings from Windows, we give this connection an IP
In WSL2, we set the eth0 route to this IP, we can now ping what is plugged in the Ethernet adapter
(We run XLaunch to have be able to use GUI apps with this connection)

The new addition to our setup is the switch. Before we had one, we could plug each HD to the USB-C adapter and ping it, communicate etc. We also tried several HDs on the switch, but without the local network and it worked, too. We could ping each device independently with 10.X.X.10, 10.X.X.11 etc. But the addition of the wired local ethernet network gives me trouble.

What can I do to set this configuration up?

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networking

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EN: Setting up a network on WSL2 with a switch, while Windows communicates with local network

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