question about running dual NICs

[MrDudeMan]

i already read this thread, so dont point me there

i made a pretty sweet mp3 server for my school network, and i am getting anywhere from 10-50 connections at a time. it is simply too much for the computer to handle, and ive narrowed it down to the RAM and bandwith saturation. i ordered more RAM, and im wondering if i get another NIC if i can load balance.

our network works like this:

we go to the school website on a lab computer and input the mac address to the website. it then asigns a specific IP to that mac address. if i were to put another NIC in there and lease another IP, do you think i could somehow set it up to distribute music and users to each card with its own port on a switch instead of everything going through the single NIC?

FYI: i already checked with the school and they dont care as long as im not letting people copy the music. i have myself on my own workgroup inside the network with maximum restrictions on everything. no one will be copying my music and i wont be giving it out.

edit: and just incase anyone was curious, everyone here has iTunes and we all share that way. i got the bright idea to put a ton of hard drives in a custom made case and share it so all of the music will be on all the time. my current collection of music is about to hit 36,000 songs. every song on the drive is from a CD from somewhere on campus, so none of it is illegal.

 

[bersl2]

I'd go with the RAM.

But if you think that one fast ethernet link isn't enough bandwidth, you can add another card. The only problem is that if you want to automatically load balance, you'd need a nameserver. Or you could tell the users to randomly choose. (This assumes the PCI bus won't be saturated by two cards.) (It also assumes that however you are serving up the files can recognize the second IP link.)

Now watch some network guru smack me down...

 

[MrDudeMan]

hehe yeah i was thinking along those same lines, just not sure if its actually possible to implement. i figured someone here could shoot me down pretty quick if it wont work. the RAM will definitely help because it only has 128 right now, and im putting a 512 in with it for now, and possibly another 512 later to replace the 128. i just cant afford both of them at the same time.

 

[skyking]

Streaming it like that, you'd have to implement gigabit to cover the highest loads smoothly.

 

[MrDudeMan]

it seems to be doing better with an increase in RAM, but it is randomly disconnecting when the traffic gets too heavy.

is there anyway to actually do this?

 

[spidey07]

its considered bad practice, but....

assign a different IP on the second NIC and have people connect to that (it depends on the OS/ip stack on how it sends the replies) or use DNS round robing to point to a name with different IPs.

Also depending on how sharp the IT department is their switches default to "auto-channeling" and you can add a second network card and "bond" them together though Cisco's etherchannel or 802.1ag link aggregation. It entirely depends on how their switches are setup as to if and how it will work though. Intel does this wonderfully from a NIC support perspective.

 

[Micronaut]

What OS are you running? Windows 2000 & XP Pro only allow 10 connections, XP Home allows 5. I don't know that this would count, because you're using an APP and not standard printer/file sharing.

Use perfmon to measure your RAM, Paging/sec, Network send/bytes/sec... see where your bottleneck is.

 

[phisrow]

The RAM is almost certainly going to improve things considerably. You might also want to look into the quality of the NIC, though. Situations like this are precisely the sort of thing that brings out the diffirence between some dubious but functional card and a real server NIC. What are you running at the moment?

 

[Night201]

I agree with the RAM. Good to hear that people are using it. Your other post about it was interesting, although I bashed you a little (nothing personal - and it wasn't really a bash). What hardware/OS are you using? RAM will definitely help.