dual network ports, any use?

[TechSupp]

Having a play with an old CachePilot of ours and wondering as it has two network ports, is there any beneffit of connecting both or just keep it as standard and use one? (Ports are on the main board and not separate cards, come up as Intel Pro/100 S Server in device manager) Have installed Server 2003 on it at moment with thoughts of just playing with VirtualBox. Its not for anything major, just so I can try a few things out leaving our main servers alone.

[FN-GM]

If you do it you will need to use the intel software to team them. Doing that will give you double the bandwidth and failover. If one NIC fails the other will take over. Plug one port in one switch and the other in another if a switch fails you can carry on.

[TechSupp]

Thanks, something else to play with. Presume I need to locate said software from Intel?

[FN-GM]

Yep, its not built into Windows.

[CyberNerd]

Network bonding is built into Linux. Very simple to do without additional downloads.

[morganw]

If you do it you will need to use the intel software to team them. Doing that will give you double the bandwidth and failover. If one NIC fails the other will take over. Plug one port in one switch and the other in another if a switch fails you can carry on.

I believe that, if both NICs are active, it's recommended to only to this on stacked switches to avoid the CPU overhead of the MAC addresses changing on standalone switches. It depends on how exactly how often a rebalance may occur though (or if rebalancing occurs at all). XenServer does it every 10 seconds for an active-active style bond so it's a stacked switch or don't do it.

[twin--turbo]

we used old crashpilots as firewalls and mail relays.

never got used for the intended purpose as the NIC was configured as per the RBC and our network was firewalled from the RBC network.

Rob

[denon101]

Just out of interest, how did you manage to get a windows server os installed? We have a cachepilot max here and I have tried on a number of occasions and not managed to get anything installed on it. It's still got the linux distro on it! If you have any pointers I would welcome them! I would like to use it for the exact same idea as you.

Thanks

[TechSupp]

Just formatted the disk, ours is an old one with a 200gb disk (2.4 celeron processor) , was left with a bit of the linux grub boot loader but using fixmbr from a windows disk got rid of that and then a straight forward windows install.

[Mr.Ben]

Server 2012 has nic teaming out of the box with no need for third party drivers/software :-)