Network Question

[Jeff Gaines]

A Microserver I bought recently had a 4 bay NIC installed, I assumed that
it was because the BIOS needed updating and the built in NIC didn't work
(which I have now fixed).

It may just have been in the spares box but how would you use 4 x NIC
connections in a small Microserver?

[Abandoned Trolley]

Post by Jeff Gaines
A Microserver I bought recently had a 4 bay NIC installed, I assumed
that it was because the BIOS needed updating and the built in NIC didn't
work (which I have now fixed).
It may just have been in the spares box but how would you use 4 x NIC
connections in a small Microserver?

Plenty of workstations can be configured to use more than one NIC - even
Windows makes allowance for "non server" machines to be used as routers.

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

Post by Jeff Gaines
A Microserver I bought recently had a 4 bay NIC installed, I assumed that
it was because the BIOS needed updating and the built in NIC didn't work
(which I have now fixed).
It may just have been in the spares box but how would you use 4 x NIC
connections in a small Microserver?

You'd gang them up to get 4gigE (except you actually get four max 1gigE
parallel streams to different clients, not one fast stream, and it may
be limited/impossible without a smart network switch too). It's fairly
pointless in a domestic environment, particularly with a microserver
that can (by my benchmarking) only push about 2gigE max from four
spinning disks anyway. The same four disks can saturate 10gigE in my
actual NAS (a Dell R520).

Failover in case of port/cable failure is configurable too; again pretty
pointless at home.

You're more likely to have an issue with the ganging/failover config
causing issues than have a real failure if you just use one port :)

Cheers - Jaimie

[Andy Burns]

how would you use 4 x NIC connections in a small Microserver?

Assuming that connecting to four individual networks has little use in a
domestic setting, you could team them together to make something
'similar' to a 4Gbe NIC.

When I say similar, that means you'd need a suitable driver, a switch
capable of LACP, and you could only achieve speeds exceeding 1 Gbps if
you had multiple devices doing transfers at the same time ...

[Marco Moock]

Post by Jeff Gaines
It may just have been in the spares box but how would you use 4 x NIC
connections in a small Microserver?

Maybe it was used as a router.
Or link-aggregation has been used to provide redundancy or more
bandwidth.

[Theo]

Post by Jeff Gaines
A Microserver I bought recently had a 4 bay NIC installed, I assumed that
it was because the BIOS needed updating and the built in NIC didn't work
(which I have now fixed).
It may just have been in the spares box but how would you use 4 x NIC
connections in a small Microserver?

One of mine used to have such a card - I used it as a router, so I needed an
additional port for the LAN side. When doing so it wasn't too much extra to
get a quad-port NIC and use the others as additional ports. I put each port
on a different network so I could apply different traffic rules.

Theo

[SH]

Post by Jeff Gaines
A Microserver I bought recently had a 4 bay NIC installed, I assumed
that it was because the BIOS needed updating and the built in NIC didn't
work (which I have now fixed).
It may just have been in the spares box but how would you use 4 x NIC
connections in a small Microserver?

or it was used with Smoothwall or IPcop
you needed 4 NICs, one for WAN, one for LAN, one for DMZ and one for WiFi

[David]

Post by Jeff Gaines
A Microserver I bought recently had a 4 bay NIC installed, I assumed
that it was because the BIOS needed updating and the built in NIC didn't
work (which I have now fixed).
It may just have been in the spares box but how would you use 4 x NIC
connections in a small Microserver?

Back when I was still a callow youth, NAS had multiple Ethernet ports to
allow load sharing.

As others have said, not really needed now unless you have really unusual
requirements (and possibly something aware of load sharing to front it).

Cheers



Dave R

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Jeff Gaines
A Microserver I bought recently had a 4 bay NIC installed, I assumed that
it was because the BIOS needed updating and the built in NIC didn't work
(which I have now fixed).
It may just have been in the spares box but how would you use 4 x NIC
connections in a small Microserver?

Many thanks for all the replies :-)

All way beyond me, the speed of my brain is the limiting factor in my
computer use nowadays!

[Bernard Peek]

Post by Jeff Gaines
A Microserver I bought recently had a 4 bay NIC installed, I assumed that
it was because the BIOS needed updating and the built in NIC didn't work
(which I have now fixed).
It may just have been in the spares box but how would you use 4 x NIC
connections in a small Microserver?

I've got two microservers fitted with 2.5Gb network cards with a patch-cable
link between them. One has a DHCP server for a separate subnet that's not
visible from the Internet. I did consider a 4 port card to set up a separate
SAN but one port is all I need for now. With a 4 port card you could create
subnets for your NAS boxes that can't see the Internet or each other.