two network cards

[Florian G. Pflug]

On Sat, Mar 13, 1999 at 06:11:22AM +1100, robert wrote:
> hello, I am wondering if there is an advantage to running two network
> cards on the same network (physical and logical).
> It seems to me that 2 10mbs cards will be able to get 2x the information
> to the machine in the same time. This would show an improvement if the
> processor,disk,io devices etc were having to wait on the network
> connection (ie the network is the bottleneck).  IS THIS TRUE? or am i
> just being nieve.
> any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
> I am just trying to get even better performance from my samba server.
> robert
> ps please email direct as I am not currently subscribed to the list.
> thanks.
Hi

Well, I guess two NIC (network interface cards) would PHYSICALLY be able to
deliver 2*10=20mbit - but you would have to find a way to make some of your
clients use one card, and the others user the otherone. Since the two cards
have to have different ip-addresses, you would have to (manually) let one
client use one ip-address, and other clients use another. DNS supports this
(by mapping the same domain name to different ip-addresses), but I think the
real speed improvement will be poor.

What we do here (in our school) to improve speed, is to use a switch instead
of a hub. The switch has 10mbit-ports for the clients, and 1 100mbit port
for the server. This would theoretically allow 10 clients to access the
server with 10mbits at the same time...

                                           Greetings, Florian Pflug