Re: dual NICs, same brand or not?

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

Damon Muller wrote:
> 
> Quoth Ron Farrer,
> > I'm building a firewall out of an old 486 and was wondering if it was
> > best to use two NICs of the same type/brand or to use different ones? Is
> > there any gotchas for doing one over the other?
> 
> I find that's it's easier to use two different cards (not just different
> brands, but different chipsets) because you can easily dictate which one
> will be eth0 and eth1 in /etc/modules.conf.
> 
> Using the same brands will certainly work, but you'll probably end up
> juggling them around to work out which one is which.

  AFAIK the order of the cards is determined by their position on PCI
bus, isn't it?

  e.g. if you have:

alias eth0            8139too
alias eth1            tulip

  you cannot just change it to:

alias eth0            tulip
alias eth1            8139too

  can you?

  I have two same card and I just have:

alias eth0            8139too
alias eth1            8139too

  in modules.conf (really in in /etc/modutils/erik.eth) and I know that
eth0 is dsl line and eth1 is home lan, to change this I would have to do
HW change, not SW change, regardless of whether the cards are same or
not, right?

	erik