Re: 2 nics, 1 network, puzzle?
<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
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