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building my first linux server box. Question - how many NICS??

E

Ender510

Golden Member
I ordered the BMC Barricade DSL/Cable Router from Amazon a few days ago, so this will take care of assigning IPs.. but my question is, do I need 1 or 2 NICS in the Linux Box? Would I only need one since the switch is going to take care of the IPs?
 
my assumption would be that you need only one NIC. You should only need two if you are really bandwidth constrained. I doubt you actually need 200Mb/sec.
 
I'm pretty sure you will only need one NIC because with the router you can talk to the other computers on your network as well as surf the internet.
 
Here is the question I pose. Suppose I only have one NIC. The IPs are all assigned by the switch. Now, how would I be able to stop someone from just hooking up their laptop to my switch and getting an IP that way and getting access to the network?

I figured, with 2 NICS, the NIC that is hooked up to the intranet will be doing the validations against the other systems on the network. But since the router/switch will be the DHCP server, serving the IPs to the client machines, how will the server be able to differentiate between the systems on the network or which ones that shouldn't be? Not that anyone would really break into my house, just to connect to my intranet - but I am just curious nonetheless.. whereas, the other side of the coin is where the server (linux server) handles the DHCP and assigns IPs and knows which computers should be on the network and shouldn't be being authenticated when the user logs in?
 
I don't know about the SMC router, but in the Linksys router you can tell the router how many DHCP ip's can be given out... all you have to do is set that number to the number of computers on your LAN and no more will be given out after they are all assigned. It should have a DHCP client table with all of the ip assigned and the MAC address of the client's NIC.
 
So anyone know how many NICS I will need for my linux server?

Also, will 192 megs of RAM be that much of an improvement over 128 megs?
 
The router will handle all DHCP processes, so technically the Linux box will be relegated to file server because it won't be handling any of the network issues... the router will take care of that.

If you want to use Linux to be able to keep your network somewhat under control you're going to have to get rid of the router in the equation. You can't have two DHCP servers on one network... just won't work.
 
So would it be better to NOT use the router then and just use an internal 10/100 HUB to control the networking? What are the pros/cons of using it vs not?

How about as far as memory allocation goes? I understand you can't have 2 DHCP servers.. but wondering which would be better and why?
 
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