<quote who="Shawn Yarbrough"> > I've thought up a good example of why somebody might want to put multiple > network cards, in one computer, all on the same network: > > Imagine that you have an existing 100 Mbit/s network, a fast computer not > yet on the network, and three salvaged 10 Mbit/s network cards. Sure, > you could go out and buy a shiny new 100 Mbit/s network card... but why? > I think Linux should help you to preserve your existing hardware > investment.
I don't think thats a real good excuse :) I remember buying 2 10/100 NICs (realtek 8139) about 3 years ago for $20 each, and 3 years later they still both work perfectly. If you plan to pull 30mbit of data often you do want to fork out the $50 for a better NIC. I run several dozen servers and the average utilization of the 100mbit connection is about 0.5% according to MRTG/SNMP. > > So, you cram all three 10 Mbit/s network cards into the computer and hook > it up to the network's 10/100 hub on three seperate ports. You run an > ftp server bound to eth0, a web server bound to eth1, and an IRC server > bound to eth2. Your fast computer is now a 30 Mbit/s server on a > 100Mbit/s network. whether you intend to or not, you have just described link aggregation accross the interfaces. the fact that you put in 3 NICs and expect to get 3x the bandwidth .. most linux network drivers are not capable of this out of the box. I only know of the Znyx cards..they work well .. http://www.znyx.com/products/hardware/zx340q.htm http://www.znyx.com/products/software/rainlink/default.htm Rainlink provides: - Automatic hardware failover - Multi homing - Link Aggregation (what you describe above) - Load balancing (make sure each network card is equally loaded) (I'm not aware of any linux drivers that can just 'do' this) I have a sun Ultra 10 at work which has 2 NICs, I could plug the 2nd in, assign it an ip and see if the results are the same.. I would think they would be(solaris 7). these cards are pricey, I have 3 of them in service, the 4port versions, they run about $700 each, I am using them on FreeBSD 4.4. you may be able to do this with normal NICs and good switches, from initial looks it seems my Extreme Networks Summit 48 has a feature called 'port sharing' which may be able to help link aggregation, not sure though. nate -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
