Arch Linux

ssl6

Member

From: Ottawa, ON, CA

Registered: 2007-08-30

Posts: 594

dual NICs?

Just curious, is there a way to use 2 network cards in a machine, to connect to the same network, say to provide extra bandwidth? I'm kind of bored here just looking around for something to do, and I have a pile of network cards in a box, wondering if there's a way to add a second one to my server to try improving connection speeds for file transfers?

i've been trying to do some research, I'm sure its possible, since I'm finding lots of articles for windows, and some for linux, they're just all rather dated, so i'm not sure if everything is still the same or not, or if there's a newer method, thats why i'm asking

Last edited by ssl6 (2009-12-11 16:35:06)

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MadTux

Member

Registered: 2009-09-20

Posts: 553

Re: dual NICs?

You can connect 2 NIC's to the same network but I doubt that this will improve performance, since the communication has to go through one particular network card. That means, the application that starts the communication will do this through one particular card and the response will be routed back to that particular card. At least thats my understanding.

Nagian

Member

From: Altach, Austria

Registered: 2009-08-03

Posts: 70

Re: dual NICs?

I think you will gain a little bit more speed, if you let use different applications different NICs. But I don't think it will be very much.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: dual NICs?

Ethernet bonding is what you're looking for - see the wiki's Network page for some more details.

ssl6

Member

From: Ottawa, ON, CA

Registered: 2007-08-30

Posts: 594

Re: dual NICs?

yeah, looks like thats what I'm looking for

now more questions, can i use network manager with it? would it essentially be the same configuration with it, except i'd just be pointing to to bond0 instead of eth0 for example?

and then the other thing is i use static dhcp on my router, so it assigns whatever ip to the mac address of the current nic. i'm kind of wondering how that would work.....

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fukawi2

Ex-Administratorino

From: .vic.au

Registered: 2007-09-28

Posts: 6,223

Website

Re: dual NICs?

Note that you must have a switch that supports bonding, otherwise it will bork out and complain when the same mac and IP address come in 2 different switch ports...

As far as the mac goes, you are essentially creating a new virtual interface from the 2 physical interfaces, so it will get it's own mac address. I believe the mac address will be changed on all cards to be the same (they do on Fedora). I don't know which mac address gets chosen (eg, one of the existing cards, or a new one made up).

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