Bill wrote on Sun, Jun 23, 2002 at 03:56:48PM -0700 :
> I was under the impression that running two nic's with the same ip addresses 
> and differant mac addresses was a no no and would screw your network.

Normally you are correct, however there are two modes that you can
utilize to gain additional functionality:
1) bonding:  where the driver takes both cards and "bonds" them
together.  If you have two 100 Mbit cards, bonding yields a theoretical
200 Mbit channel.  Whether the PCI bus hardware can actually provide
that sort of throughput is an exercise for the reader (ie reading from
one or more hard drives for data and then passing it to the kernel
modules when then send it out over the two nics)
2) bridging:  If you have two seperate physical networks but have a
common netmask, you can configure a bridge such that both sides see a
common ip address and you can then control access from one side to the
other (a firewall of sorts).  A common application of this is the
wireless access point.  If you have a Prism chipset you can use the
HostAP software and it will do all of this for you.  In the event that
you have two or more wired type nics, the kernel also directly supports
bridging.  

For an example of bridging:
ifup eth0
ifup eth1
brctl addbr br0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 eth1
ifconfig br0 192.168.188.1

Now anybody connected to either nic will access the machine as
192.168.188.1.

Blue skies...           Todd
-- 
  Todd Lyons -- MandrakeSoft, Inc.   http://www.mandrakesoft.com/
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because 
  that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn
   Cooker Version mandrake-release-8.3-0.2mdk Kernel 2.4.18-20mdk

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