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Dual NICs

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by ð 2 views

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Does anyone know if there's any software/utilities that can combine two 3Com 3c905 NIC cards together to work as one? I know compaq has a utility but that doesn't work with the 3com cards. Any help would be appreciate...

Thank?
?

10 replies

by tomsal

Hi. I'm curious as to what you are aiming to accomplish from doing this? For reasons of security and/or bandwidth you can accomplish both with using dual NICs without "working as one".

I'm at a loss for what benefit (except saving ports/hardware real estate) would come from such a tactic.

by estebandelatorre

Hi,
If you want more bandwith, just install the two nics and you are on!. No special software required!. If you have two switches, plug one cable to each switch.
If you want, you can assign different subnets to each nic and you have made a very basic vlan.
Compaq provide fault tolerance software for it's servers. That software allows you to build a faul tolerance nic system, but only one is active and the other in standby, connected to the switch. If the nic fails, the software binds all the protocols and configurations to the standby card.

by beermonster

simply putting two nics in a machine does not achieve load balancing. At the hardware level, comms between cards is via the MAC address, and a client communicating with your machine will do so using one address, so will only talk to one card. What you are after is a teaming utility, this software creates a 'virtual adapter' and configures multiple adapters to respond to a software based MAC address \ IP address. I would suggest that the 3com website is the first place to look.

by ð

Sorry about the miss unstanding. I'm not looking for bandwidth, it's no point having higher bandwidth than what's on the back bone. I'm looking for an utility like the compaq manager but for the 3com 3c90x NICs. What I wanted to do is to find an utility that would allow me to Team up/Set fault tolerance with the 3c90x NICs in case one NIC dies the other will automatic take over.

by raffi_

You can try the IPMETRICS solution (link below) but my strong advice is to (what else?) spend a little cash and buy a server NIC that comes with the software. You will get a more robust solution where the software is optimised for the card(s)
Adaptec makes a good one - ANA-62022

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

regards
Raffi_

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