>>Thoughts on an A-B box to control two RJ-45 inputs and one RJ-45 output to my computer so that, at any one time, only ONE service would be connected ...
That's easy. Won't work.
Electrical connectivity (such as what an AB switch lets you control) has nothing to do with IP visibility. It's your IP configuration that has to change with the service, not the physical connection.
That's both the beauty and the curse of routable protocols such as IP. Your NIC will sit and watch IP packets go by all day, but unless it's configured to respond to the IP address in the packet header it's deaf as a post.
That means you can plug in as many services as you can find hub ports for, but you can't talk to any of 'em unless your IP configuration matches what the other end of the service needs to communicate.
Generally speaking, when the service is connectivity to a wide-area network (such as the internet), you do only want to talk to one at a time, since they duplicate each other (when both are working).
You can buy routers which will do this job for you. To do it right you'd need a router that's smart enough to detect a failure in one path and update its routing tables to the other as necessary. That's what smart routers do. I don't know what they cost, but they're not priced for the home market.
There may also be software that will do it on your workstation reasonably cheaply, dunno, good question. This is the opposite of what most proxy servers and IP gatewys do, BTW.
I'm in a similar situation, and I update the routing tables by hand when I need to change routing. So I can tell you, it is indeed possible (at least on NT). But you need to know a bit about IP configuration to do it.
Anybody know of routing software that will handle this problem?
Wingate, Winproxy, etc, solve the other end of the problem (how to connect two PCs to one source; problem here is to connect one PC to two sources).
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