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Using two LAN cards to double speed?

Zorba

Zorba

Lifer
I am living in the dorms at school, and in my room I have two 100Base-T network jacks. I have a LAN card built into my motherboard and then I also have my LAN card from my old computer. Both are 100Base-T. I was wondering if it was possible to run both cards to "double" the speed. I have heard of this kind of thing with modems but never really heard of it with network cards (well besides in servers.) I am running Win98 First edition.
 
No you cant do that. You need a lot of high end equipment such as switch that support trunking and nic card that support it. What you can do though, get a server nic card such as intel server nic and make the onboard nic card as a redundant link, so if your server nic ever goes down, the onboard nic will pick up.
 
Its for on campus transfers 🙂. You know when you want to download your friends "song" collection 😉.
 
Originally posted by: Zorba
Its for on campus transfers 🙂. You know when you want to download your friends "song" collection 😉.
Click to expand...

Gasp!! My righteous indignation knows no boundry!
 
Originally posted by: Zorba
Its for on campus transfers 🙂. You know when you want to download your friends "song" collection 😉.
Click to expand...

But that won't help much unless your friend has the same setup too.
 
off the top of my head, i dont see why it isnt possible. at least you could make one the reciever, one the sender.

bottom line is it isnt worth it since you are likely to be bottlenecked in other places, even on-campus transefers are sure to go througha switch or hub etc. even if you he gave off the prime 100mb to you (he wont) then youd still be wasitng your full capacity.
 
Originally posted by: martind1
off the top of my head, i dont see why it isnt possible. at least you could make one the reciever, one the sender.

bottom line is it isnt worth it since you are likely to be bottlenecked in other places, even on-campus transefers are sure to go througha switch or hub etc. even if you he gave off the prime 100mb to you (he wont) then youd still be wasitng your full capacity.
Click to expand...

Full duplex is in essence one for send and one for receive, just on the same card.

You can "bond" two nics together for performance or redundancy but unless you know how the network is setup it won't do you any good. See if your NICs support etherchannel or port aggregation.

Maybe your school uses cisco CatOS switches and left etherchannel in auto mode - you could acutally for a channel with both nics to the switch.

But it won't give you any performance impact.
 
i wasn't talkign about full duplex.

i looked back and my post was a bit confusing on what I was meanign to do.


doesn't matter, still doesn't seem worht the effort. you probly wont see any gain anyways cause 100mb is ALOT and if you cant max that out (which i dont think you would at a school) then you wouldnt max out the 2 cards, so there woudl be no gain
 
I figure out that while 2 cards will not work.

4 cards may quadruple the bandwidth.

Since 2 in the power of 2 is 4.

That is called truth by association.

Like:

All men have legs.

Donkeys have Legs.

So all Men are Donkeys? :Q😉
rolleye.gif
:frown::disgust:😱:brokenheart:😀
 
Originally posted by: JackMDS
I figure out that while 2 cards will not work.

4 cards may quadruple the bandwidth.

Since 2 in the power of 2 is 4.

That is called truth by association.

Like All men have legs.

Donkeys has Legs.

So all Men are Donkeys? :Q😉
rolleye.gif
:frown::disgust:😱:brokenheart:😀
Click to expand...



what??!?!?!

so confused
 
Actually, the Intel Pro 100S + management NIC (terrific nic btw) is a great card which offers exactly that feature.
You just put 2 in each PC you want to connect, use the Intel software to bundle them and then you have a 200Mbit full duplix network.

They cost around 50 bucks around here, which may com as a shock to ppl with 10 buck nics, but the performance is way better then those realtech pos cards. And since I installed 5 of them 5 years ago I never ever had a single network complaint with them. No matter if win98,NT,2K or XP.

hope this helps
 
The only real problem is actually getting them to use both nics.

For a single TCP session only one nic is used. And the nic is usually picked based on destination mac address.

Using 2-4 nics really helps though on a server where there are 1000s of connections.
 
For all of you who claim that this is possible and works seamlessly, what layer is doing the interleaving and reassembly?

Let's assume for an instant that you fool Windows into treating both NICs as a single piece of hardware (i.e., single Internet Connection with a single IP address) which automatically somehow interleaves IP packets between the two Ethernet cards. How would you handle the problem of conflicting ARP entries (one IP address but two MAC addresses)? I guess the driver assigns the same MAC address to both NICs when they're bound together? And if each of your NICs has the same MAC address, how do you prevent your switch from being horribly confused at the multiple identical MAC entries in its switching table? And finally, if you "solve" this problem by allowing the switch to permit identical MAC addresses on different ports (i.e., by just mirroring frames to each port that claims to have the same MAC address), how would the switch prevent the classic MAC address spoofing attack that forces switches into broadcast mode to allow NICs to listen to the traffic of a particular workstation?

And if the above situation is not possible (i.e., it's not possible for the cards to share an IP address), then wouldn't the application have to be aware that there are two connections available and use them both accordingly (therefore it certainly wouldn't be "seamlessly" integrated)?

Just curious...
 
kylef,

Etherchannel and link aggregation do exactly as you describe. It really is a layer 2 function (well, some switches and cards make the distribution decision based on layer3 address).

A few quick things that might make it make sense:

1) yes, one mac address for both cards. Otherwise you would have arp problems. Switch treats it as one layer2 link, just happens to be two layer1 links
2) To the operating system it is indeed one network card. The load balancing is handled by the driver.
3) OS needs to transmit a frame and presents it to the driver to place on the wire. Nic then performs an XOR on the last 3 bits of the source and destination mac address and decides which "wire" (nic) to put it. The important part here is that if the conversation is between a single src/dst mac pair then the whole conversation happens on a single nic
4) OK, now that we've covered the nic transmitting look at the other end. The switch transmitting. Switch looks at bridge table and needs to place frame on port 1. Port 1 actually is a link aggregation or etherchannel port compromised of port 1, 2, 3, 4. Switch performs XOR of last 3 bits of src/dst mac address (or IP address depending on switch capabilities) and places frame on that port.

That's about it. Works really well with multiple connections (just like any load balancing does). Down fall is to watch how the balancing is done. In most networks the server is only talking to its gateway (router) so layer two distribution isn't all that effective - you need to balance on layer3 addresses.

So there is no real interleaving and reassembly involve - its reduced to which egress port do I place this frame on?

good link...
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk213/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094714.shtml

-edit- to answer your other question. The beauty of it is the OS and TCP/IP stack is completely unaware of separate network cards. It is all handled seamlessly at the driver level. Stack say to driver "send this packet", nic frames it up and sends on whatever nic is decided upon based on the algorithym described above. It really is beautiful and the answer to many a net engineer's prayer. I begged for this in the mid 90s.

What's even better? You can do this with 4 gigabit cards as well. Cisco supports up to 8 physical links in a single channel.
 
Ah, thanks Spidey. So there *is* some switch interaction involved. That's what I would have thought... otherwise, there would be too many other problems.

So in the case of the fellows above in this thread, they wouldn't be able to do this unless their NICs and the switch hardware happened to support the same aggregation scheme, right?

That is pretty cool otherwise. Good link, too. Cisco's site has lots of great gems... IF you can find them! 🙂
 
hah .. its totally possible. just get NIC Express ..

http://www.ipmetrics.com/ipms/download.html

Just a note .. i messed up my windows networking playin with this thing, so you should really set a restore point before installing this..
It installs something over socks4, and messed stuff up for me .. Had to reinstall! It should work.. Just be careful 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Zorba
I am living in the dorms at school, and in my room I have two 100Base-T network jacks. I have a LAN card built into my motherboard and then I also have my LAN card from my old computer. Both are 100Base-T. I was wondering if it was possible to run both cards to "double" the speed. I have heard of this kind of thing with modems but never really heard of it with network cards (well besides in servers.) I am running Win98 First edition.
Click to expand...

If you want to boost your performance, upgrade to a different O/S. 98 First Edition?!?!
 
Originally posted by: Carp1812
Originally posted by: Zorba
I am living in the dorms at school, and in my room I have two 100Base-T network jacks. I have a LAN card built into my motherboard and then I also have my LAN card from my old computer. Both are 100Base-T. I was wondering if it was possible to run both cards to "double" the speed. I have heard of this kind of thing with modems but never really heard of it with network cards (well besides in servers.) I am running Win98 First edition.
Click to expand...

If you want to boost your performance, upgrade to a different O/S. 98 First Edition?!?!
Click to expand...

that will boost mem performance (if you move to NT based os's like 2000 or XP) but does it change network relations? (XP does have a great newtowrk wizard, but doesnt change the performance)
 
I currently have 384/128 dsl (far away from the CO). I can now get 1024/128 cable. I'm locked into my dsl contract for another 8 months so Ill have two services. Can I install two nics in my WinXp box, each with its own router and have two seperate networks?
 
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