Networking Software

bullzisniprbullzisnipr Topeka, KS
edited July 2008 in Science & Tech
Alrighty, so i have something i need..

I have a home server with 6 harddrives totalling around 700GB of storage. I have two NIC's in this machine and i know software exists to do this, but i dont know what it's called. Anyway, what i want to do is dedicate one NIC to upload and one to download to maximize my throughput over the home network. My switch can handle this much throughput so thats not a problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Kyle

Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited July 2008
    First let me say that what you don't want to do is force one device for uploads and the other for downloads that's not efficient, nor is it practical.

    What you are talking about is called load balancing or nic partnering. While there may be software to do it - I've never seen any. It's all about the drivers that your nic's support, the lists of drivers that do that are actually rather limited. There a few nforce boards that do it and some intel chipset nic's also that do it but it's actually pretty rare.

    However there are a few really simple ways to help do load balancing that don't require much effort.

    Lets say that you have 6 computers + this server all connected to a switch.

    The 6 computers will be on Ip's .2 - .7 and the server will be .10 and .11 they are all on the same workgroup, or you could be running in your own domain it doesn't matter. But the server will be called 'fileserver'

    On 3 of your computers edit the hosts file to have 'fileserver' point to .10 on the other 3 computers edit the hosts file to have fileserver point to .11. Your network is now split up.

    Now what if you have 2 computers that really punish the file server and the other 4 don't - well just split up your network accordingly. Hell you could have 1 computer pointint to 1 nic and the other 5 to the other if you wanted.

    That's all you really need to do to maximize your network. Setting things up like this will deliver about as good throughput as any load balancing or nic paring will provide for a home network. Your server itself only can transfer so much data at any one time due to hardware access anyway.
  • kithylinkithylin
    edited July 2008
    The best way to do this is to get two identical Intel Pro "Server" nic's and install the intel drivers. Inside the intel drivers it has options for "Teaming" for increased bandwidth.

    I have a dell server here in my closet that has two identical 2-port nics in it, both in the 66mhz pci slots, and the drivers installed. I setup Teaming on em and it can push 400 MB/sec on the network with 4 100Base-T nic ports in it.

    Also you need certain special switches designed to support it, just because your switch supports the bandwidth does not mean it supports teaming.

    I had to get a 8-port HP ProCurve switch for mine.

    I don't know about any other software for any other brands of nic's, but this is the ones i know work, and you can get these 2-port nics fairly cheap online these days, try ebay.
  • bullzisniprbullzisnipr Topeka, KS
    edited July 2008
    ic, well thanks for the help guys.
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