Damon Muller wrote: > Quoth Ron Farrer, > > I'm building a firewall out of an old 486 and was wondering if it was > > best to use two NICs of the same type/brand or to use different ones? Is > > there any gotchas for doing one over the other? > > I find that's it's easier to use two different cards (not just different > brands, but different chipsets) because you can easily dictate which one > will be eth0 and eth1 in /etc/modules.conf. > > Using the same brands will certainly work, but you'll probably end up > juggling them around to work out which one is which. >
I have an "ether=...." line to the kernel at boot whether I use the same NICS or different ones. I like to always know which card is which. I learnt this the hard way once, I admin a firewall with 4 NICS in it, with 3 Brands (1 3Com Vortex, 1 Dec Tulip, 2 Intel EEPro100). One day after an "apt-get upgrade" and a kernel rebuild the cards shuffled themselves. Had a devil of a time sorting what was what (4! permutations), juggling leads (not the cards), while everyone around was screaming "I need the network!!" at me. John P Foster http://www.golden-orb.com
