Multiple NICs

[Haden]

Hi,

Here is what I'm trying to do: I've added second NIC to my file server, so it could serve ftp/etc. on one NIC, and smb share on the other.
Some kind of load balance I guess. NICs got different IPs, but are both on the same network (however connected to different switches, for performance gain).
The problem is, that for some reason second NIC gets ignored, that is if I do arping to IP1 and IP2 macs are the same (from IP1), also if I unplug one (any) cable I still can "access" server via both IPs.
It would be normal for forwarding, but ip_forward is 0 and it's not actually the case I think.
I also tried balancing with nexthop, but it results in funny behavior (both nics claim they got IP1 and IP2)...
Server is running Debian Linux 2.4.19.
Any help would be welcome.

TIA

 

[Oaf357]

Hmm... this isn't really possible (AFAIK) but it might work if NIC#1 (ex. 192.168.0.1) was on one network and NIC#2 (ex. 10.10.0.1) was on another. But then you'd really be segmenting your network, which might work if you tell the FTP server to listen on one IP and the SMB server to listen on the other, but then you really wouldn't have to segment your network then.

This is becoming a ficious circle... I'll stop now.

 

[Haden]

Yes I didn't wanted to segment network.
However I took another try with balancing and It goes just perfect, thought I had to add
another route to gateway (balanced route to 192.168.0.0/16 seems to get ignored and I get Net not accessible when trying to add route to gtw) as work around.
However without this tiny problem It's a dream 🙂 Accepts connections in round-robin and such.

But I still wonder about simple solution. Strange if it's not possible :/

 

[Oaf357]

It's a matter of letting the NICs know what they can and can not do. That's what I think the problem would be.