Can having two network cards increase speed to a local area network if you plug both of them into two separate jacks???

[Imaginer]

Like the title says.

 

[noxipoo]

umm no

 

[Fumiup]

Heh kinda funny. If i'm right you can connect 2 computers together using 100mbps full duplex you actually get 200mbps speed. How much faster do you need?

 

[jmcoreymv]

Fumiup: Thats 200 mbits total, each one can only transfer at 100 mbits, but since they can both send and receive at the same time they can cummulatively get 200 mbits.

 

[Imaginer]

No.

There are two ethernet jacks in the wall. and there are two network cards, there is one computer.

 

[Imaginer]

If it is correct, how would one set it up?

 

[The Stigenator]

we do loadbalencing and increasing of over bandwith this way.

1. use a 2 or a 4 port nic and have them set to be one IP address - it will load balence better.
2. if you use two of them it will load balence. but you will not have no control over how the tcp/ip packets are routed. you cant state, ok you card #1 you only receive and you card #2 you transmit. That wont happen.

 

[vi edit]

I don't believe that there is any way to "shotgun" a LAN connection.

I believe that the only way to increase throughput would be to increase your bandwith -

IE going for 10bt to 100bt, or 100bt to gigabit ethernet, ect.

Out of curiosity, what are you trying to accomplish?

If it's for internet access, you're going to max out a 10bt anyhow.

 

[mrbios]

No, because no matter what, you are still sharing the same 100Mb's of bandwidth. The only way to get more bandwidth is to upgrade to a gigabit ethernet.

Russell "Mr.Bios" Sampson

 

[JonB]

I have seen this scenario in practice.

One server at a local school. It is running WinNT with two 10/100 NICs (different IP addresses, of course). Some server apps are assigned to one IP address, some are assigned to the other. Both NICs go straight to the wiring closet. I seen no reason why you'd have to stop at two NICs, but if you only run two server applications, then having three addresses doesn't help much.

[edit] another thought. One server, four NICs, (four IP addresses, four different DNS names). If you had a 100 client LAN, then 25 connect to one IP, 25 to another, etc... Total throughput would probably only be limited by the server, not by the network architecture. The server could actually be communicating with four clients at one time, instead of just one. [end edit]

 

[JonB]

Oh, and a quick add on question.

In Win2K, it was very easy to find the configuration to tell my NIC to be full duplex. Where did they hide it in Win9x??? The two PCs I'm looking at have NICs (according to the box) that say they'll full duplex, but nowhere in the Control Panel/System/Device Settings can I find a way to force them.

btw, just replaced a hub with a switch and want to maximize the throughput. The switch's LEDs only show my Win2K box and my printer server as full duplex.

 

[Fandu]

It can indeed be done. Same idea as "shotgun" modems. I used run a couple systems at home here with dual 10Mbit cards in them, connected to the same switch. I think it was Win95 OSR2.1 that I was using back then and it had native support for doing exactly this. So yes it can be done, yes you double your throughput. I have seen systems with quad 100Mbit Full duplex cards in them all being bonded to form a 800Mbit theoretical connection, but there's only two situations in which it's really worth it.
1) Where you have a small network, just want higher throughput, and both/all computers have dual NICs' or
2) A huge network where a server is dealing with hundreds of clients and your running sever different networks/subnets, so that that the huge server bandwidth is not wasted when routed over a single 100Mbit network.

 

[Fandu]

<< No, because no matter what, you are still sharing the same 100Mb's of bandwidth. The only way to get more bandwidth is to upgrade to a gigabit ethernet. >>



That's 100Mbit/sec per connection to the LAN. Two seperate network connections, 2 NIC's, 1 computer = double the speed (theoretically).

Just sitting here thinking, and one other scenario that I've seen is a gateway setup between two different networks. One machine on each network was acting as a gateway and had 2 NIC's, then they just threw in 2 crossover cables and they had a dedicated 400MBit connection between the two networks, pretty sweet!

 

[xyvyx]

Well, what you're wanting to do is probably very vendor specific.

I've setup a few Dell PowerEdge servers with dual NIC's. I believe these are Intel (82559-based) Pro/100+ Server Adapter cards. The Intel drivers for these call it &quot;Adapter Teaming&quot;. We're just using it for fault tolerance, but it can also be used for their Adaptive Load Balancing. It works with 2-4 cards and it just says they must all be plugged into the same switch. I was pretty sure that it required a switch that knew how to direct traffic destined for one MAC address to any of the ports being used, but their documentation implies just a switch, not an &quot;Intel brand switch&quot;.

Fandu: while I don't doubt what you're saying, I'm VERY sceptical about any kind of advanced networking features of Win95, esp. something like this. (at least INTEGRATED with 95 rather than an add-on driver)

Oh, I just got to the good part of the documentation.. this is what I was thinkin' about... Cisco's Fast EtherChannel. This makes sense. ALB mentioned above only works for transmission... the switch doesn't KNOW that the one server has 4 NICs. FEC, however, does, but it requires a Cisco switch or some device that supports FEC.

BTW.. what the heck are ya' doin that could use this much bandwidth ? It's not likely that anything but a multi-peer PCI bus server could make use of it!

Here's Intel's page about it:

http://www.intel.com/network/technologies/load_balancing.htm