Samba with 2 nics?

Good evening, I'm looking at building a high traffic server (streaming HDTV and very large files) that will serve a Gigabit network and clients with a Gb switch. The server will have at least 2 nics in it and I was curious if it's possible to have samba "load balance" across both nics so that the server only appears as one machine on the network and will use both nics simultaneously? I've found plenty of info on setting it up on 2 subnets but I really don't wanna do that if at all possible. I've also found this thread http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-...ba+balance.html which makes it look like it'd be possible to setup iptables and have it do the balancing. Does Samba have any sort of internal ability to do this or am I looking at an external app/firewall rules? Any info is greatly appreciated.

Bumpage

I don't have the answer but I'm interested in your results.

Hello

Im interest too. This is a great idea.

Fordman

Imho you're looking at a switch with special firmware. Loadbalancing like this will only work if both ends understand the speciality of the situation. Since Linux, due to its openness, is easier to mod than anything else, that means the more closed and proprietary switch has to support it from the get go.

After much searching it seems I'm kinda screwed without buying a REALLY expensive switch. The firewall method would sort of work but according to people who understand iptables MUCH better than I, it wouldn't do a REAL ballance, just whichever connection was inactive at the time of connect. So it would be possible to have 2 or more poeple using only 1 nic and the other completely idle if the connections occured at just the right time.

How many clients are we talking here? If it is a lot, then you could try the poor man's load balancer, a DNS round robin (or even poorer, manually specifying the different NICs by IP).

Besides that, if you want any kind of effectiveness, you will want to get a 802.3ad compatible switch (aka "Ethernet Bonding"). Cisco has their own proprietary "Etherchannel" bonding. You will need to configure the bond on the Linux side too.