[Discuss] multi-port NICs

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2006-08-16 23:39-0700 R. McFarlane wrote:

> Hello all,
>
>        Has anyone here on the list had any success using a multi-port PCI 
> NIC? I see on the internet somewhere last week, that there was (or is) a 4 
> port PCI NIC. Currently I have 4 NICs in my firewall and I think it equates 
> to 3 different chipsets. I have heard of some linux drivers that have a hard 
> time knowing which port is what on the card (eg : eth0 may be port 1 today 
> but upon reboot it is port 3), so I was wondering if anyone here has used or 
> is using such a card and what success or failures they have had.

If you don't want to spend the money replacing perfectly good equipment,
there are ways to control the port order for a multi-nic situation.  For
example, on Debian you can force a particular order by the order of the NIC
modules mentioned in /etc/modules. That only handles the case of different
modules for different NICs, but I have heard of more powerful methods (but
never investigated them further because my multi-nic situation can be dealt
with using the /etc/modules method).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________