What do people do with Dual NICs?

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mjz_5

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A lot of nVidia based motherboards come with 2 onboard NICs. Why and what are people doing with 2 NICs? Motherboards companies are producing them, so I am assuming there is some sort of demand.

???

Thanks
 
Well, you could have one nic for WAN (internet) and on for LAN (local) to make the pc act as a router, server, or firewall. Also, you could hook each up to a different internet connection and download multiple files twice as fast or download and game at the sametime. But only if you're [H]ardcore!
 
How would internet explorer know which internet connection to download from? It would always pick the primary, no?
 
mjz_5 said:
How would internet explorer know which internet connection to download from? It would always pick the primary, no?
Click to expand...

I imagine that there is some sort of utility which could let you specify things like that. Never looked into it tho since I can barely afford to pay for one broadband connect. Also, I bet *nix based systems would have a better time of it.
 
In the case of a WAN/LAN split dual connectivity, it essentially boils down to this: if an ARP request fails the traffic is sent to the Gateway to be routed across the internet.

When having the connections going to two separate WAN connections, they are usually load balanced. In some cases you can "bond" the two physical interfaces as one logical interface.
 
mjz_5 said:
How would internet explorer know which internet connection to download from? It would always pick the primary, no?
Click to expand...
Its called routing, type "netstat -r" in your command prompt (Win/Linux/BSD all actually have the same command and switch which shoudl work) and it will show you your current routing table.
 
To answer the original question, there are many reasons for having multiple NIC in a single machine. It can be used to reside on 2 separate networks at once, which is probably the most common. Also, with any decent switch you should be able to do 802.11q trunking to aggregate the bandwidth of the 2 interfaces into one. Personally, I use a second NIC as a dedicated link between my primary development machine and my file server. This allows me to access files on my server at full speed without affecting any of the other machines on my network.
 
Wolf31o2 said:
To answer the original question, there are many reasons for having multiple NIC in a single machine. It can be used to reside on 2 separate networks at once, which is probably the most common. Also, with any decent switch you should be able to do 802.11q trunking to aggregate the bandwidth of the 2 interfaces into one. Personally, I use a second NIC as a dedicated link between my primary development machine and my file server. This allows me to access files on my server at full speed without affecting any of the other machines on my network.
Click to expand...
Also, I don't know if many do this, but it can also be used in network security where you can have your NIDS listening to your network traffic, without actually being a part of it, but be on a seprate sec system only network to send alerts or data to other systems. Allows you to keep the networks completely seprate, and lowers the chance of compromising. Basicly its the same thing as your first suggestion, just with a bit more of a security focus.
 
Currently two of my friends are using their dual-NIC's for routing, have been for several years -- I never did, I fully standby managable routers/switches to handle my network traffic.

One of them is currently detirmined to create a load-balanced network via dual NIC's but I dont see the point given my access speed is adequate for my personal needs.

~Kris
 
Me I will need it because we have broadband and my parents want to connect to computers to share the internet connection. So I need one computer to act like a router for the other one. And the other connection for the actual internet cable.
 
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