Lan party fileserver

[Keego]

Hey I was thinking of putting up a fileserver for patches/nocd's/maps/etc for a lan party and I want to somehow give it an advantage over all the connections so it doesn't get bogged down when 100 people try to get on it. What could I do? There wont be any special hardware available, mostly 24 port switches afaik so far. If I put 2 nics in the comp, and connected them both to a switch (or 2 different switches) what would happen as far as windows file sharing.. would it share the connections or would it only connect to one?
ex: if the name of the comp was Games and someone typed \\games and started pulling files off it, would both nics be operational or only one? How does windows decide which one?
I dont get it

 

[CoolTech]

hrmm, id like to know this answer too, i have intel pro 100+ cards, i heard i could somehow combine the cards bandwith, but i could never find links about the desktop cards that proved this. only the server cards

 

[gogeeta13]

Hmm, good idea. I remember that modem bonding thing, and I am curious if that is possible with networks. The problem is, the PC can only have one network identity. But it may be possible to have one nic be NetBIOS and the other be TCP/IP. You then drop them into separate workgroups. When I get my dsl and network up, I will try some of these things. Once again, damned good idea!

 

[MulLa]

Hm... I guess you'd get 2 IP addresses one for each NIC. Then have different users connect through a different IP address?? Maybe some expert can tell us the answer.

 

[Cenalian]

I'm no expert, but I believe that MulLa is right. If you assing 2 different IP addresses, it would work on the same basis as ICS... you'd be able to use both NICS at the same time.

Are you using actual switches or just hubs??