Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

[Dannyx]

Good day folks. Hopefully posting this in the right place. I know there are many discussions all over the interwebs about this topic, but is it any good in bridging the onboard Realtek gigabit network controller of a Gigabyte motherboard and an ASUS PCI NIC that I've got laying around ? Some details first: this computer is sitting in my closet hosting and downloading torrents onto its hard drive It's got an Intel Xeon x5460 and 4Gb of RAM on it.....overkill ? Maybe, but that's not important (it was my old rig anyway). Its hard drive is shared, so it essentially acts as a NAS server: whenever I want to watch something I've downloaded, I navigate to its IP and there you go. Managing it is also easy via remote desktop. I'm aware a second NIC connected to the same router (a Dlink DIR-825 by the way) will not speed up the upload/download speeds, but perhaps it can at least contribute on the LAN somehow, particularly when I'm watching a movie or something stored on it.
To be fair, I've already tried it, but here's the weird part: after bridging the adapters and configuring the bridge, only the onboard NIC seems to "do" something, as the ASUS PCI NIC just sits there. Its status window only shows 1 received packet and 0 sent ones and its activity LED doesn't flash either, so it made me wonder whether it's contributing anything AT ALL or having the opposite effect and using up space and resources :| I know it's a silly project that's only appropriate for server-grade equipment, but can it work at all somehow, or am I better off sticking with the built in adapter ? Any thoughts ? Cheers.

[diif]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

You can't plug two NICs in the same PC into the same router. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say. You can plug another device into the bridged NIC though.
The "server-grade equipment" you refer to is a motherboard that supports Teaming.

[Dannyx]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

You can't plug two NICs in the same PC into the same router. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say. You can plug another device into the bridged NIC though.
The "server-grade equipment" you refer to is a motherboard that supports Teaming.

Ok, then scrap the whole project, since that's exactly what I wanted to do It makes sense, since only ONE NIC can transmit at a time, but I thought there'd be some way of pulling it off nonetheless...I kinda know the theory behind it

[diif]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

No, both NICs can transmit at the same time. I often bridge between two NICs on my PC but have another PC hooked up to the second one.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

AFAIK both NIC's need to be of the same brand since the teaming is done driver level...

[stj]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

but is your router and internet faster than the ethernet?
unless you live in Japan i doubt it.

[Dannyx]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

but is your router and internet faster than the ethernet?
unless you live in Japan i doubt it.

I specified that I know such a setup would NOT speed up the WAN side of things, I was curious about the LAN segment.

[stj]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

probably not - pci bus would be the limiting factor.

[diif]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

Windows Server 2012 supports NICs from different vendors as long as it's supported by the OS.

[Topcat]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

FWIW, I team the dual gigabit NIC's on all my workstations. Intel's driver makes it easy. I've never tried to team NIC's of different brands, didn't even know it was possible.

[Dannyx]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

FWIW, I team the dual gigabit NIC's on all my workstations. Intel's driver makes it easy. I've never tried to team NIC's of different brands, didn't even know it was possible.

Possible - yes (select the adapters in "network connections", right click, select bridge connections). Practical - not so much or not at all, as in my case the PCI one didn't seem to Tx/Rx anything - NADA ! 1 sent packet The bridging function in Windows is not quite meant for that - it's just the equivalent of ICS from what I can tell.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

Do you mean bridging or bonding? Big difference.
Bridging will connect two otherwise distinct networks together into the same collision domain, so packets are shared between them. It will copy any traffic seen on one side of the bridge to the other.

Bonding will make two network connections act as one. Both network connections have the same IP. Unfortunately the other end also needs to be aware of it and negotiate a special connection.

ICS in windows is NAT to the rest of the world.

If you can live with two different IP addresses for each interface, you can connect two ethercards to the same router. However since they are distinct network connection, you need to carefully select which interface gets what packets, and it's more annoying than it sounds. Load balancing DNS works when the machine is listening to requests; however transmitting requires special work to make sure the applications don't get confused... and selecting which interface is not always clear.

[Dannyx]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

Do you mean bridging or bonding? Big difference.
Bridging will connect two otherwise distinct networks together into the same collision domain, so packets are shared between them. It will copy any traffic seen on one side of the bridge to the other.

Bonding will make two network connections act as one. Both network connections have the same IP. Unfortunately the other end also needs to be aware of it and negotiate a special connection.

ICS in windows is NAT to the rest of the world.

If you can live with two different IP addresses for each interface, you can connect two ethercards to the same router. However since they are distinct network connection, you need to carefully select which interface gets what packets, and it's more annoying than it sounds. Load balancing DNS works when the machine is listening to requests; however transmitting requires special work to make sure the applications don't get confused... and selecting which interface is not always clear.

I was a ware of both bridging and bonding, and I know BONDING is what I'm looking for and I DID try it, but it had the same issue: after setting up both NICs individually, only one of them was doing all the work, even messing around with the metric and setting it to 1 on the other one. I then tried bridging, which was of no use either (which makes sense now, given that you've essentially got both cables going to the same place). It seems the client side is not the only factor here - the switch/router to which you connect has to do something too for this to work....don't know if mine supports that.

[mariushm]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

PCI bus is limited to 133 MB/s, or about 1.2 gbps . If you get two pci gigabit cards, or if your onboard network card is connected to the internal pci bus, you won't get 2gbps out of them.

You can buy network cards with 2 or 4 ports and they're cheap these days, if you want new you have cards based on Realtek RTL8111 for under 40$ for example here or here , or Intel based cards (slightly better for around 85$) like here for example.
Note though that the Realtek cards are pci-e x1 which most motherboards have and has a bandwidth of 500 MB/s (close to 4gbps) while the intel card works on x4 slot but can in theory be inserted in x1 slot and will work. Of course, both can work in x8 or x16 slots.

If you have a switch that supports link aggregation, you can configure LACP on both the network card and the switch to create a 4 gbps channel between them. However, each individual connection between your computer and other computers connected to the switch will work on just one interface so you can't achieve more than 1gbps with just one transfer.
However, if you had two computers each connected to a switch with 4 linked ports, you could for example set up a ftp server on one computer and use a ftp client on another to upload or download files with multiple connections, and each connection will hopefully be using a different port so you'll get more than 1 gbps out of the card, if your hard drives can keep up.

As a sidenote, last week (or this week) the 802.3bz standard was finally ratified/approved/whatever , which means it's the final versions and manufacturers can start making cards and put in the specs that they support 802.3bz.
Here's what it means : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T
Basically, the cards can transfer at up to 2.5gbps on regular CAT5E cable and up to 5 gbps on CAT6 or better cables, and they'll downgrade the speed down to 1 gbps automatically if the other computer (or the switch) doesn't support it
So while 10gbps network cards are expensive (typically $150-300 new, excluding the ones using optical fibre which can be found on eBay that are pulled from old servers), these cards have the potential to cost much less, I'd say under 50$ each.
So you could buy two of these and use a simple cat6a cable between them (without any switch) and get 5gbps speed without any special configurations.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

I was a ware of both bridging and bonding, and I know BONDING is what I'm looking for and I DID try it, but it had the same issue: after setting up both NICs individually, only one of them was doing all the work, even messing around with the metric and setting it to 1 on the other one. I then tried bridging, which was of no use either (which makes sense now, given that you've essentially got both cables going to the same place). It seems the client side is not the only factor here - the switch/router to which you connect has to do something too for this to work....don't know if mine supports that.

Now it makes more sense for what you're doing since bridging is also a common operation for multiple network interfaces (I have a Firebox X1000 that I bridge four of its Ethernet ports together so these extra unneeded-for-routing ports can be used as additional LAN ports.)

Chances are your switch/router is the problem. I have an unmanaged switch that apparently does not support 802.3ad which will not support bonding/trunking. However I do have a spare managed switch in case this unmanaged switch buys the farm...and it may actually support 802.3ad...

[Dannyx]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

Now it makes more sense for what you're doing since bridging is also a common operation for multiple network interfaces (I have a Firebox X1000 that I bridge four of its Ethernet ports together so these extra unneeded-for-routing ports can be used as additional LAN ports.)

Chances are your switch/router is the problem. I have an unmanaged switch that apparently does not support 802.3ad which will not support bonding/trunking. However I do have a spare managed switch in case this unmanaged switch buys the farm...and it may actually support 802.3ad...

I'd plug straight into my router, but it doesn't matter anyway, since it wouldn't work...way too much trouble for a useless project.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

Sometimes I really wish I can pump more than 1Gb/s out of my server, mostly because it is a file server and I copy files from machine to machine often (backups) and other machines that are using it as a fileserver get bottlenecked out.

This situation is fairly rare though... but sometimes when you want a copy of the data, you want the data NOW!

[Dannyx]

Re: Bridging an onboard NIC and PCI NIC, any good for LAN ?

Sometimes I really wish I can pump more than 1Gb/s out of my server, mostly because it is a file server and I copy files from machine to machine often (backups) and other machines that are using it as a fileserver get bottlenecked out.

This situation is fairly rare though... but sometimes when you want a copy of the data, you want the data NOW!

I'm facing kinda the same issue when watching something off of my Utorrent "server", though I always do so from my laptop over wi-fi, which means the bottleneck is pretty severe anyway: when "seeking" from one part of the video/song to another, it would hang for a few seconds. I thought an additional card might help relieve some of the network congestion in some way, but it kinda failed