Arch Linux

mariusmeyer

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 244

One or two connections?

Hi all!

On my computer I have a Ralink RT61 chip that has been working fine for me for a few years. I recently bought a D-Link Wireless N router, and with it, a NETGEAR WN111 v2 USB network adapter. The Linux kernel driver for this adaptor is not the most stable in the world, as 802.11n is not really implemented yet. I've been successful in using it to some extent though, but I sometimes find that using the old 802.11g ralink thing makes my connections last longer. So what I've been doing for the latest weeks is to use BOTH to connect to my router. That is, my rc.local has the following:

dhcpcd wlan1&
dhcpcd wlan0&

in it. Does anybody know if this is a good solution? Would I get a faster connection doing this than using only one of the two hardware components? Or could this make the one get in the way of the other, data-recieving-wise? I do not know how routers handle these things you see.

Any info would be appreciated!

Cheers M

Wintervenom

Member

Registered: 2008-08-20

Posts: 1,011

Re: One or two connections?

As far as I know, it will not make your connection any faster unless whatever particular network application you're using has the ability to use multiple network interfaces.  [It seems that] There might be a way to make a virtual network interface that could use both of them, and route your Internet applications through it, but I would know nothing on how configure that.

hexanol

Member

From: Canaduh

Registered: 2009-08-04

Posts: 95

Re: One or two connections?

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I guess that, behind the scene, you are only using one interface, the one which last set up the routing table. If you post the output of "route -n", we should see that only one interface is used. Also, if you look at the output of "ifconfig", you should see one interface with a lot more TX/RX bytes then the other.

And last, since your WNICs share the same "collision domain" (i.e. same wireless channel), they can't be used at the same time. But that's not a real problem since only one should be used actively.

On another note, you can aggregate multiple NIC into a single logical interface to get interesting property (greater speed, no single point of failure, etc). If you search for "Linux bonding driver", you'll get more information about it.