[LARTC] 2 NICS. More Bandwidth?

[LARTC] 2 NICS. More Bandwidth?

[Svavar Örn Eysteinsson]

Hello everyone.
I have one question to ask.

I have a Fileserver on my local network.
Is there any way, or is it just possible increase the bandwidth to the
fileserver if it has 2NICS.

I have a 10/100 Local Network, so is it possible to increase the 
Bandwidth to the fileserver by installing the second NIC and do some
"funky" Advanced routing and QOS?.


	File Server				10/100 Switch
	-------------			|------			Local
Area Network
	| 		|			|	|
-------------------
	| 		|			|	|
|			|
	|		|			|
|[<---------------|Client1		|
	|-----------|			|	|
|			|
	|  NIC NR1  |-------------->]-|	|[<---------------|Client2
|
	-------------			|	|
|			|
	|  NIC NR2  |-------------->]-|	|[<---------------|Client3
|
	-------------			|	|
|			|
	|		|			|
|[<---------------|Client4		|
	|		|			|	|
|			|
	-------------			-------
-------------------



Any help and suggestions appreciated. :0)

Best regards,

Svavar Orn
svavar@atom.is
Reykjavik - Iceland

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Re: [LARTC] 2 NICS. More Bandwidth?

[Michael T. Babcock]

> I have a Fileserver on my local network.
> Is there any way, or is it just possible increase the bandwidth to the
> fileserver if it has 2NICS.

Look up 'bonding' in newer kernels...
-- 
Michael T. Babcock
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Re: [LARTC] 2 NICS. More Bandwidth?

[Gerry Creager N5JXS]

We're assuming 100 Mb/sec now, right?  The rules change a little with 
GBE NICs wrt who's got the better hardware...

Bonding has actually been available for some time; the beowulf clusters 
have taken advantage of it for years.  I believe it went into the kernel 
tree around 2.0.16, but it could have been after the release of the 
2.2.x set.

A couple of things have to be considered, including the quality of your 
NICs.  Some of th elow end ones will never provide good performance 
(RealTek comes to mind in our experience) while almost anything with the 
older DEC Tulip chipset will perform well, as will most of the Intel 
products.

Is your PCI bus speed up to the task of multiple NICs?  An older 
computer running a slow bus can bog down at times.

Also, if your server is busy, multiple interfaces and a round-robin DNS 
implementation may be a good answer without bonding.  Similarly, access 
via a switches, rather than shared, network interface is a performance 
enhancer.

gerry

Michael T. Babcock wrote:

>>I have a Fileserver on my local network.
>>Is there any way, or is it just possible increase the bandwidth to the
>>fileserver if it has 2NICS.
>>
> 
> Look up 'bonding' in newer kernels...
> 


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[LARTC] 2 NICS. More Bandwidth?

[Leonardo Balliache]

Hi, Svavar :

I have set bonding and it works fine... but..

Before spending your money try to figure out first what your system 
bottleneck is...

I purchased another NIC and installed bonding only to discovered that my 
bottleneck was the hard disk's server.

Best regards,

Leonardo.-



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