Re: dual NICs, same brand or not?
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.
>
I have an "ether=...." line to the kernel at boot whether I use the same NICS or
different ones.
I like to always know which card is which.
I learnt this the hard way once, I admin a firewall with 4 NICS in it, with 3
Brands (1 3Com Vortex, 1 Dec Tulip, 2 Intel EEPro100). One day after an "apt-get
upgrade" and a kernel rebuild the cards shuffled themselves. Had a devil of a
time sorting what was what (4! permutations), juggling leads (not the cards),
while everyone around was screaming "I need the network!!" at me.
John P Foster
http://www.golden-orb.com
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