How do i make two NIC's work as one ?

As the subject asks.... how can i do so ?

The more important question is why would you want to.. each Network Interface Card (NIC) has a unique Hardware Address or Media Access Control (MAC) Address they uniquely identify an adapter on a LAN and as such each card would have its own Identity.

What exactly is the pupose of this ?? what are you attempting to do ?

Ok, I have my two D-Link 538TX 10/100 connected to each other VIA crossover cable @ 100mbps/full duplex. I also have 1 SMC EZ Card "11 12" 10/100 in each computer. Connected VIA HUB @ auto speed/duplex. I get a max transferrate of 11,XXXkb/sec with the D-Links how they are, & and max transferrate of 1,1XXkb/sec with the SMC's how they are. I was able to bridge them both and the computer took away both IP's from the NIC's on both computer and have them to the "brigde" computer #1 wiuth "192.168.0.1" & computer 2 with "192.168.0.2" but the bridge didnt work. it only used the D-Links. So is there a way to do what i want to do ?

basicly I want to try and add the bandwith from the SMC's---->to the D-Links if ti can be done liek how I asked above.

The only NIC aggregation protocol that I know of is from Cisco, called Etherchannel. You can read about it at this site. This is not really the technology you want(plus your hardware doesn't support it), since all IP stacks associate a single IP with 1 MAC address, and thus 1 100mbit NIC. To make it short, to increase the transfer rates buy a pair of gigabit cards for your crossover connection.

DDR-PIII said:

Ok, I have my two D-Link 538TX 10/100 connected to each other VIA crossover cable @ 100mbps/full duplex. I also have 1 SMC EZ Card "11 12" 10/100 in each computer. Connected VIA HUB @ auto speed/duplex. I get a max transferrate of 11,XXXkb/sec with the D-Links how they are, & and max transferrate of 1,1XXkb/sec with the SMC's how they are. I was able to bridge them both and the computer took away both IP's from the NIC's on both computer and have them to the "brigde" computer #1 wiuth "192.168.0.1" & computer 2 with "192.168.0.2" but the bridge didnt work. it only used the D-Links. So is there a way to do what i want to do ? [/QUOTE

Click to expand...

The general terminolofy for combining multiple interfaces into a single logical entity is known as trunking. Most advanced switches (think $1000 and above) are capable of it though, in general, standard PC NIC's aren't.

The technology involved is both hardware and software; i.e. you'd need both the hardware and the software to support it. You aren't likely to find this type of advanced capability in ANYTHING produced by D-Link or SMC. Even Intel's more advanced cards that might support it probably won't for anything other thank Win2K or XP.Net (I know that for the longest time their linux drivers didn't support 802.1p and q VLAN tagging).

Now, the more important point here is that you really aren't likely to see much of an improvement, even if your could.

If I understand what you were trying to do with bridging, I don't think that it works the way your were thinking it should. When you bridge connections in XP, you are turning your computer into a very overpriced switch. If you create a bridge and you connect a computer to two bridged ports, you will end up with a loop and bad things happen.

My advice to you is to take the bandwidth that your D-Links are giving you and be happy.

It's just for fun If I can do it that'd be cool and if I can thats cool too but I'll look around for some mroe info on this

There is also a software solution,
NICExpress - Linky

It does Trunking via software.. from my use with it, it's kinda buggy, unless you have a managed switch that is set up for trunking to it. Lots of lost packets.

This solution is mainly for server load balancing (where thousands of requests come in, and each NIC takes it's own part of that load), or server redundancy (where if one NIC fails, then the other NIC will take over immediately).

All outgoing traffic from that computer will only go out though one NIC though (default gateway).

in xp i belive you can bridge the nic cards to act as one but i dont know for sure

im sure there is some thrid party software some wehre that will do it if you do a google search

trunks do not increase bandwidth on a given link, they only allow multiple vlans to exist on one physical link. larger bandwidth connections(gigabit) or possibly etherhchannel(depends on topology and role of box in the network) are the only way to have one box send/receive > 100mbps on a single network.

As far as the post about link failover goes, the intel proset drivers allow for link failover on Intel cards. I believe newegg.com sells compatible cards for < $50.00. Of course, you should have a l2 environment that would make it worth it, which most people don't have in a home network. The dual/quad port adaptec nics can be had for cheap on ebay and they allow you to create etherchannel bundles and I think they do link failover as well.

Edit:
Freebsd allows dot1q tagging which is very cool as well. There is also an old etherchannel driverhere. However I haven't been able to get them to work together, must be why the etherchannel driver isn't part of the base source code. =)

JasonKosi said:

The general terminolofy for combining multiple interfaces into a single logical entity is known as trunking. Most advanced switches (think $1000 and above) are capable of it though, in general, standard PC NIC's aren't.

The technology involved is both hardware and software; i.e. you'd need both the hardware and the software to support it. You aren't likely to find this type of advanced capability in ANYTHING produced by D-Link or SMC. Even Intel's more advanced cards that might support it probably won't for anything other thank Win2K or XP.Net (I know that for the longest time their linux drivers didn't support 802.1p and q VLAN tagging).

Now, the more important point here is that you really aren't likely to see much of an improvement, even if your could.

If I understand what you were trying to do with bridging, I don't think that it works the way your were thinking it should. When you bridge connections in XP, you are turning your computer into a very overpriced switch. If you create a bridge and you connect a computer to two bridged ports, you will end up with a loop and bad things happen.

My advice to you is to take the bandwidth that your D-Links are giving you and be happy.

Click to expand...

crash893 said:

in xp i belive you can bridge the nic cards to act as one but i dont know for sure

im sure there is some thrid party software some wehre that will do it if you do a google search

Click to expand...

no, briding allows your XP computer to become a "bridge" between two networks. it simply allows computers connected to one NIC to communicate with computers connected on the other NIC.

alrox said:

trunks do not increase bandwidth on a given link, they only allow multiple vlans to exist on one physical link. larger bandwidth connections(gigabit) or possibly etherhchannel(depends on topology and role of box in the network) are the only way to have one box send/receive > 100mbps on a single network.

Click to expand...

I was talking about IEEE 802.3ad Trunking. Mentioned earlier was Cisco's port Trunking FEC/GEC (fast ether channel/gigabit ether channel), which is another method.

one thing to remember.

your connection is only as fast as the slowest section.
doing this if you have a cable/dsl connection is beyond pointless.

Getting two NICs or more to work together is called channel
bonding. It has been done for years on Beowulf clusters to
increase the inter-node bandwidth.

Linux always has been, and always will be, your friend.