Dual-LAN ports, what's the point?

[DGath]

They've been on server boards for years but for whatever reason, they're starting to show up on the high-end gaming/performance 925 boards. I'm sure there's some reason for this, but just can't think of a good reason to have dual-lan ports. Anyone wanna shed some light on this?

 

[Anubis]

IIRC you can plug in 2 different connections and Bridge them essentially making your connection faster cause you can split where the data is coming from

 

[LordPhoenix]

The advantage to having two ethernet ports would be if you are running a ring network as your network topology or if you are doing a p2p private network.

Wow having a 10/100/1000 is really nice you wouldn't really noticed a differance though if you use that 10/100 pci because you would still get a 100mbps network unless you upgraded the other network card to 10/100/1000 and used cat 5e or cat 6 cable then you would get 100mbps.

 

[uOpt]

Obviously you can use one for your Internet connection and one for your LAN.

Personally I am too cheap to buy a gigabit switch now (need a good number of ports and want 19"), so I have my server and my gaming machine connected with a crossed cable. Both have non-PCI gigabit ethernet, so this really flies.

The rest of my machines is on a 100Mbit hub on another Ethernet card in the same machine.

But then I have 5 Ethernet ports in my server so don't listen to me

 

[Slowlearner]

Two onboard LAN connectors appeared on high end nForce2 boards like A7NV8 Deluxe about 3 years ago, and the only possible reason for them on a home network would be to run ICS. Before the use of routers became commonplace, pleople trying share an internet connection had to struggle with the two NIC installation problem - I would love to trade notes with people who ACTUALLY have two NICSs installed and working in their PC.

With routers now in the 30$ price range, running ICS makes no sense and having two LAN connectors serves no useful purpose.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Slowlearner
Two onboard LAN connectors appeared on high end nForce2 boards like A7NV8 Deluxe about 3 years ago, and the only possible reason for them on a home network would be to run ICS. Before the use of routers became commonplace, pleople trying share an internet connection had to struggle with the two NIC installation problem - I would love to trade notes with people who ACTUALLY have two NICSs installed and working in their PC.

Including when I plug in my USB 10/100 NIC, I have *four* NICs at a time. No problems in W2K and XP.
Win98se has some sort of internal limit on NIC-protocol bindings, so it can only have up to four instances of TCP/IP bound to adaptors, unless you make some registry tweaks at install time. In Win95 (maybe OSR2), the limit was eight. Yes, they actually lowered the limit, only MS knows why.

Originally posted by: Slowlearner
With routers now in the 30$ price range, running ICS makes no sense and having two LAN connectors serves no useful purpose.

For the most part - unless you are setting up a HTPC or a box with a private LAN connection to a file/media-server, and then using the other connection for the internet.

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: Slowlearner
With routers now in the 30$ price range, running ICS makes no sense and having two LAN connectors serves no useful purpose.

I strongly disagree.

With an external hardware router you are bound to whatever it provides for firewalling, NAT/masquarading and forwarding.

If you have the firewall and NAT under OS control you have all the flexibility in the world. There are a lot of wacky things you might want to do.

Just for example, I play a game which is hardcoded to use just one port (server port, incoming). So if I want to serve two game sessions of this from two different computers behind my firewall, I have to selectively forward to the same port on different machines based on source IP address. Unless you have a full-IOS Cisco router you can't do that with a hardware router.

Plus there area plenty of broken routers which do timeout on NATed TCP connections and other stuff they are not allowed to. And you have no sourcecode.

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: Slowlearner
I would love to trade notes with people who ACTUALLY have two NICSs installed and working in their PC.

I missed that the first time around. I have 5 ethernet interfaces in my server (CSA mainboard plus a 4x 100mbit PCI, plus occasionally a USB card and probably soon a wireless card). Works like a charm. The gaming station has two as well.

Of course, I don't use Windows, that might have to do with it

And you really really don't want to do that with Realtek cards.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

I used to run two NICs, one outside the hardware firewall for un-restricted internet access and other behind the firewall for network based storage and other uses. Gave me lots of freedom. Its also good for people that want to share an internet connection.

 

[rockhudson]

Originally posted by: MartinCracauer
Personally I am too cheap to buy a gigabit switch now (need a good number of ports and want 19"), so I have my server and my gaming machine connected with a crossed cable. Both have non-PCI gigabit ethernet, so this really flies.

I've done the same thing, because I am also too cheap, with the server and the PC each connected both to the home 100 Mbps network and to each other's gigabit nic through a crossover cable. But how do you force the machines to route through the gigabit route when sharing drives (ie, netbios over tcpip), and not through the slower home network?

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: DGath
Dual-LAN ports, what's the point?

To RAID them up for killer SPEED :laugh: