using both onboard network cards

[Mic]

Would it be possible to use both the lan ports on the Asus Formula Maximus motherboard? Setting them them up so that one is for outgoing traffic and the other for incomming only? if so, how to do this?

[rogard]

There are different types of layer 2 load balancing - find out which one you can support (hardware and software) and which one you want to have:
Mode 0: Round Robin. Transmissions are load balanced by sending from available interfaces sequentially packet by packet. Transmissions only are load balanced. Provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

Mode 1: Active-Backup. This is the simplest mode of operation for bonding. Only one Ethernet slave is active at any one time. When the active connection fails another slave is chosen to take over as the active slave and the MAC address is transferred to that connection. The switch will effectively view this the same as if the host was disconnected from one port and then connected to another port. This mode provides fault tolerance but does not provide any increase in performance.

Mode 2: Balanced XOR. This is a simple form of load balancing using the XOR of the MAC addresses of the host and the destination. It works in general fairly well but always sends the packets through the same channel when sending to the same destination. This means that it is relatively effective when communicating with a large number of different remote hosts but loses effectiveness as the number decreases becoming worthless as the value becomes one. This mode provides fault tolerance and some load balancing.

Mode 3: Broadcast. This mode simply uses all channels to mirror all transmissions. It does not provide any load balancing but is for fault tolerance only.

Mode 4: IEEE 803.ad Dynamic Link Aggregation. This mode provides fault tolerance as well as load balancing. It is highly effective but requires configuration changes on the switch and the switch must support 802.3ad Link Aggregation.

Mode 5: Adaptive Transmit Load Balancing. This mode provides fault tolerance and transmit (out going) load balancing. It provides no receiving load balancing. This mode does not require any configuration on the switch. Ethtool support is required in the network adapter (NIC) driver.

Mode 6: Adaptive Load Balancing. Like mode five but provides fault tolerance and bidirectional load balancing. The transmit load balancing is identical but receipt load balancing is accomplished by ARP trickery.

[Mic]

ok, so I guess it's not possible to just use one for incomming and one for out going traffic. Just read somewhere that it would be useful in some cases as many internal lan cards didn't handle full duplex the optimal way.

Balanced XOR doesn't sound to bad as I got some programs pulling information from sometimes over a hundred sites at once.

Just not sure if the hardware supports it (onboard LAN on X38 chipset) Buffalo WZR-HP-G300N router.

[little_scrapper]

Balanced XOR doesn't sound to bad as I got some programs pulling information from sometimes over a hundred sites at once.

Torrenting that hard core pron!

[Biznatch]

The problem is most high speed connections cant even come close to saturating a gigabit connection. Even pulling info from over 100 sites, you are still limited by your internet conection. So the benefits would be insignificant, if at all.

[Mic]

Torrenting that hard core pron!

that's the other server


Biznatch: I had some problems with the computer loosing internet connection now and then when connected to to many sites. Which was why I noticed some talk about using two lan ports to prevent that sort of problems. Downloaded and ran som TCP tweaker which seems to actually fix my problem in this case.

[Serra]

Using 2 NICs shouldn't really solve torrenting issues. As other posters said, your Internet speed <<<< Gigabit speed. It is technically possible to hit an OS-imposed connection limit per NIC, but I haven't really heard of that being an issue ever. Your home router is definitely capable of frying though. To use DD-WRT (custom firmware) for example, it allows up to 4096 concurrent sessions and will not allow any more... and it counts "concurrent" as "within the last hour" (hopefully unless terminated properly, but without viewing the source code I couldn't say). Either way, that's really not a lot when you start talking about large torrents. And again, that's on custom firmware; I would expect most manufacturer software to have limits at or below that line.

[Biznatch]

Using 2 NICs shouldn't really solve torrenting issues. As other posters said, your Internet speed <<<< Gigabit speed. It is technically possible to hit an OS-imposed connection limit per NIC, but I haven't really heard of that being an issue ever. Your home router is definitely capable of frying though. To use DD-WRT (custom firmware) for example, it allows up to 4096 concurrent sessions and will not allow any more... and it counts "concurrent" as "within the last hour" (hopefully unless terminated properly, but without viewing the source code I couldn't say). Either way, that's really not a lot when you start talking about large torrents. And again, that's on custom firmware; I would expect most manufacturer software to have limits at or below that line.

I agree, my little wrt54g with DDwrt would still get hot and slow down if I didnt restrict my torrents quite a bit. Just get a small low power system with a couple NICs running PFSense as your router. Thats what I run and never have any issues like that unless my ISP is crapping out.