On the advice of this list, we recently purchased a D Link DFE570TX 4 port network card to use in our new Linux server to give us loads of network bandwidth to the machine. The card is fitted and working great, and I can imagine various schemes to exploit the four interfaces. Can anyone advise on the best way to do this? For information, the server is essentially using Samba to impersonate an NT domain controller which provides authentication and data storage for all staff and pupils. Client machines are mainly NT workstation, although there are about 30 Risc OS machines, and will shortly be 100 or so LTSP Linux boxes working to another server (or servers) which will also rely on this server for storage and authentication. Sadly we only have one 24 port switch and shed loads of hubs. -- Phil Driscoll
On the advice of this list, we recently purchased a D Link DFE570TX 4
network card to use in our new Linux server to give us loads of network bandwidth to the machine.
The card is fitted and working great, and I can imagine various schemes to exploit the four interfaces. Can anyone advise on the best way to do
On Monday, November 05, 2001 12:18 PM Phil Driscoll wrote: port this?
[...] Does your switch support "trunking" (this is the SMC documentation's term, I'm not sure if it's used by other manufacturers). With some SMC switches at least, you can designate two or four ports to be a "trunk", connected either to another switch, or to a multiport NIC. That would give you an 800Mb/s full duplex pipe between your server and the switch. The kiddies could have some fun trying to saturate that! Michael --------------------------------------------------------- Michael Beddow http://www.mbeddow.net/ XML and the Humanities: http://xml.lexilog.org.uk/ Linux in Schools: http://linux.lexilog.org.uk/ The Anglo-Norman Dictionary http://anglo-norman.net/ ---------------------------------------------------------
On Monday 05 November 2001 11:45 am, Michael Beddow wrote:
Does your switch support "trunking" (this is the SMC documentation's term, I'm not sure if it's used by other manufacturers). With some SMC switches at least, you can designate two or four ports to be a "trunk", connected either to another switch, or to a multiport NIC. That would give you an 800Mb/s full duplex pipe between your server and the switch. The kiddies could have some fun trying to saturate that!
I think it does (I also think it's an SMC switch), I'll read the manual next time I go into the school. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
just a thought, but have you got a seperate IRQ number for each interface on the card ? recently had some performance (and time out) problems with multiple NICs. Check with ifconfig, interested to know Malcolm On Monday 05 November 2001 12:18, Phil Driscoll wrote:
On the advice of this list, we recently purchased a D Link DFE570TX 4 port network card to use in our new Linux server to give us loads of network bandwidth to the machine.
The card is fitted and working great, and I can imagine various schemes to exploit the four interfaces. Can anyone advise on the best way to do this?
For information, the server is essentially using Samba to impersonate an NT domain controller which provides authentication and data storage for all staff and pupils. Client machines are mainly NT workstation, although there are about 30 Risc OS machines, and will shortly be 100 or so LTSP Linux boxes working to another server (or servers) which will also rely on this server for storage and authentication. Sadly we only have one 24 port switch and shed loads of hubs.
-- ------------------------------------------- Malcolm Herbert Red Hat Europe t: +44 1483 734955 m: +44 7720 079 -------------------------------------------
On Tuesday 06 November 2001 8:48 pm, Malcolm Herbert wrote:
just a thought, but have you got a seperate IRQ number for each interface on the card ? recently had some performance (and time out) problems with multiple NICs. Check with ifconfig, interested to know
Three of the ports use IRQ 11 and the fourth uses IRQ 10. Note that these settings are as assigned by Yast2 - I haven't done any manual configuration. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
On Tuesday 06 November 2001 8:48 pm, Malcolm Herbert wrote:
just a thought, but have you got a seperate IRQ number for each interface on the card ? recently had some performance (and time out) problems with multiple NICs. Check with ifconfig, interested to know
Three of the ports use IRQ 11 and the fourth uses IRQ 10. Note that
On Wednesday, November 07, 2001 10:45 AM 8:48 pm, Phil Driscoll wrote: these
settings are as assigned by Yast2 - I haven't done any manual configuration.
The problem is that most motherboards assign these shared IRQs when the BIOS initialises the PCI bus devices, long before the kernel takes control. I have at this very moment a working install of Mandrake 8.1 on a hard disk. If I plug it into an ABIT m/b, the NICS get separate IRQ's. Plug the same disk and NICs into a Gigabye m/b and they get a shared IRQ. You see this on the ROM bios initialisation screen, before any disk access. Is there any general way of re-assigning PCI bus device IRQs once the BIOS has done its stuff? I don't know of one. I once had to demote an otherwise perfectly good m/b to running Windows, because it persisted in allowing 2 NICS and the video to share an IRQ under Linux, and I was getting the timeout problems Malcom refers to when really driving both NICS hard. Michael --------------------------------------------------------- Michael Beddow http://www.mbeddow.net/ XML and the page: http://xml.lexilog.org.uk/ Linux in Schools: http://linux.lexilog.org.uk/ The Anglo-Norman Dictionary http://anglo-norman.net/ ---------------------------------------------------------
participants (3)
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Malcolm Herbert -
Michael Beddow -
Phil Driscoll