My mobo has 2 LAN ports......
One is a Marvell and the other a Realtek.
I used to just have the Marvell enabled.
Just for an experiment, I enabled the Realtek and installed the drivers.
Now when the rig boots, I have both LAN ports enabled.

Windows 2K seems to use only the one that is first initialized upon booting, which now seems to be the Realtek. The Marvell is active, and shows a little bit of activity upon booting.

Can Win2k be setup to use both to share the load? Or use one for one program and the other for another? Or will it only setup one internet connection at a time?

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Hi

its been a long time since i had win2k but in some win os (eg win2003 and win 2008)you can team them together so they act as "one"

But the drivers need to support it and as you have two different cards that may not be possible

as to the benefit of teaming i would expect marginal if at all in home set-up - more a thing for servers pumping lots of data

each lan port will have a different IP address so if an application supported the use of a lan card exclusively that might be possible

if you want more through put to say the internet then you lan card is very unlikley to be any sort of bottle neck unless you are lucky enough to have a very high speed link (cable?)

i have one machine with two lan ports on motherboard (same type) tried teaming - but no noticable change - still keep both on and let the os decide which one to use - if one failed the other would be used - if you team and one fails i suspect you loose all wan connectivity

my too penny worth :)

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Tim

Hi

its been a long time since i had win2k but in some win os (eg win2003 and win 2008)you can team them together so they act as "one"

But the drivers need to support it and as you have two different cards that may not be possible

as to the benefit of teaming i would expect marginal if at all in home set-up - more a thing for servers pumping lots of data

each lan port will have a different IP address so if an application supported the use of a lan card exclusively that might be possible

if you want more through put to say the internet then you lan card is very unlikley to be any sort of bottle neck unless you are lucky enough to have a very high speed link (cable?)

i have one machine with two lan ports on motherboard (same type) tried teaming - but no noticable change - still keep both on and let the os decide which one to use - if one failed the other would be used - if you team and one fails i suspect you loose all wan connectivity

my too penny worth :)

Both ports are built into the mobo, no separate 'cards'.
Two different chipsets on the the mobo, I suspect.
I have a 6016k DSL connection.

I was hoping that when one program was tying up one LAN connection that when another program needed comms it would use the second connection.

But I know kitty scratch about networking, so maybe I am meowing up the wrong tree.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

My mobo has 2 LAN ports......
One is a Marvell and the other a Realtek.
I used to just have the Marvell enabled.
Just for an experiment, I enabled the Realtek and installed the drivers.
Now when the rig boots, I have both LAN ports enabled.

Windows 2K seems to use only the one that is first initialized upon booting, which now seems to be the Realtek. The Marvell is active, and shows a little bit of activity upon booting.

Can Win2k be setup to use both to share the load? Or use one for one program and the other for another? Or will it only setup one internet connection at a time?

Are they both picking up valid IP addresses for your network (DHCP or static assigned)? If a port can't assign an address it will default to a 169.254.x.y address which may not get through your router.

However, see this note about Windows 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

Use on network interface cards

Network interface cards (NICs) trunked together can also provide network links beyond the throughput of any one single NIC. For example, this allows a central file server to establish an aggregate 2-gigabit connection using two 1-gigabit NICs trunked together. Note the data signaling rate will still be 1Gb/s, which can be misleading depending on methodologies used to test throughput after link aggregation is employed.

Note that Microsoft Windows does not natively support link aggregation (at least up to Windows Server 2008).[7] However, some manufacturers provide software for aggregation on their multiport NICs at the device-driver layer. Intel, for example, has released a package for Windows called Advanced Networking Services (ANS) to bind Intel Fast Ethernet and Gigabit cards.[8] Nvidia also supports "teaming" with their Nvidia Network Access Manager/Firewall Tool.



Most PCs now have gigabit NICs (1000Gbit/s) whereas my broadband router is only 100Mbit/sec so one NIC is 10 times faster than needed anyway so it never gets overloaded.

Some software e.g. Bitorrent clients will allow you to define multiple NICs to use but I cant think of much else that does.

[Edit: Oops must have been typing at same time as Tim and Mark were]

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GPU Users Group

Are they both picking up valid IP addresses for your network (DHCP or static assigned)? If a port can't assign an address it will default to a 169.254.x.y address which may not get through your router.

However, see this note about Windows 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

Use on network interface cards

Network interface cards (NICs) trunked together can also provide network links beyond the throughput of any one single NIC. For example, this allows a central file server to establish an aggregate 2-gigabit connection using two 1-gigabit NICs trunked together. Note the data signaling rate will still be 1Gb/s, which can be misleading depending on methodologies used to test throughput after link aggregation is employed.

Note that Microsoft Windows does not natively support link aggregation (at least up to Windows Server 2008).[7] However, some manufacturers provide software for aggregation on their multiport NICs at the device-driver layer. Intel, for example, has released a package for Windows called Advanced Networking Services (ANS) to bind Intel Fast Ethernet and Gigabit cards.[8] Nvidia also supports "teaming" with their Nvidia Network Access Manager/Firewall Tool.



Most PCs now have gigabit NICs (1000Gbit/s) whereas my broadband router is only 100Mbit/sec so one NIC is 10 times faster than needed anyway so it never gets overloaded.

Some software e.g. Bitorrent clients will allow you to define multiple NICs to use but I cant think of much else that does.

Whoa........I told you I don't understand this stuff....LOL.

Are they both picking up valid IP addresses? Where would I check that?
I do notice now that they seem to be handing off back and forth once in a while....
One is active for a while, and then the other. Not quickly, maybe when one can't make a connection soon enough, the OS tries the other and then continues with it.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Whoa........I told you I don't understand this stuff....LOL.

Are they both picking up valid IP addresses? Where would I check that?
I do notice now that they seem to be handing off back and forth once in a while....
One is active for a while, and then the other. Not quickly, maybe when one can't make a connection soon enough, the OS tries the other and then continues with it.

Either bring up a command prompt and run 'ipconfig /all'

or from the Windows start menu go to settings, network connections and for each NIC click on Status and then Support and it will show a screen with the IP address on it.

[Dang my keyboard/mouse switch box has just thrown a wobbly and i cant use the mouse ............ oh - its back again ...]

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GPU Users Group

Whoa........I told you I don't understand this stuff....LOL.

Are they both picking up valid IP addresses? Where would I check that?
I do notice now that they seem to be handing off back and forth once in a while....
One is active for a while, and then the other. Not quickly, maybe when one can't make a connection soon enough, the OS tries the other and then continues with it.

Either bring up a command prompt and run 'ipconfig /all'

or from the Windows start menu go to settings, network connections and for each NIC click on Status and then Support and it will show a screen with the IP address on it.

[Dang my keyboard/mouse switch box has just thrown a wobbly and i cant use the mouse ............ oh - its back again ...]

Hmmph........

I go to network and dial up connections.....it shows both local area connections.

Clicking a bit, it shows goes to properties and such....I don't see any IP given.

I do see something interesting called load balancing...LOL.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I used to be a hardcore win2k user, and the one thing I did enjoy about XP is that the NIC properties dialog had a tab that showed you the current IP address for the NIC.

cmd > ipconfig /all should show you everything about all the NICs and their addressing. I suspect that both NICs are in fact getting 192.168 addresses, but linking the NICs together to act as one came around in XP, I believe, and not 2k. The NIC manufacturers may have some software or a utility to bridge NICs together, but it requires that both NICs be the same make and use the same driver for both.

Regarding one NIC getting data and the other not doing much, it is because they are both on the same logical network segment and therefore, the Realtek NIC's default route has a lower metric than the marvell's NIC.

For those that don't know, default route is an instruction for how to get out of your local network. Typically it means "if the IP address is not on the same network, use this NIC and send requests to this IP address (ie: 192.168.1.1)." Since both NICs are on the same 192.168.1.x network, they can both technically get to the internet, but one will be preferred over the other.

Realistically, having two NICs on the same network isn't really useful at all, unless you are able to max out a single gigabit NIC.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Whoa........I told you I don't understand this stuff....LOL.

Are they both picking up valid IP addresses? Where would I check that?
I do notice now that they seem to be handing off back and forth once in a while....
One is active for a while, and then the other. Not quickly, maybe when one can't make a connection soon enough, the OS tries the other and then continues with it.

Either bring up a command prompt and run 'ipconfig /all'

or from the Windows start menu go to settings, network connections and for each NIC click on Status and then Support and it will show a screen with the IP address on it.

[Dang my keyboard/mouse switch box has just thrown a wobbly and i cant use the mouse ............ oh - its back again ...]

Hmmph........

I go to network and dial up connections.....it shows both local area connections.

Clicking a bit, it shows goes to properties and such....I don't see any IP given.

I do see something interesting called load balancing...LOL.

For 2000 you would want Network Load Balancing. Which iirc is only supported in advanced server and datacenter. At the moment I am using NLB on an old Pii server storage server with 2 dual 100Mb nics in it. So we get ~800Mb out of it.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

if you ran out of slots on your router you could just connect another PC as a parallel and run it that way

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

if you ran out of slots on your router you could just connect another PC as a parallel and run it that way

Or buy an 8-port switch at $10 - $15, and get some extra connections that way.