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Date:      Sun, 27 Oct 2002 01:05:41 -0800
From:      Kevin Stevens <Kevin_Stevens@pursued-with.net>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Cc:        freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Dual Networks - Was: Annoying ARP warning messages.
Message-ID:  <44E18C9B-E98B-11D6-BF1E-003065715DA8@pursued-with.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0210262338400.13443-100000@InterJet.elischer.org>

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On Saturday, Oct 26, 2002, at 23:42 US/Pacific, Julian Elischer wrote:
> As one of the people whio wrote lots of the code you are using I'm
> trying to figure out why you are doing something that we never
> designed it to do because "no-one would want to do that".

> i.e. "Do we have to change any design criteria?
> Is there soemm reason that this is suddenly something people will want
> to do?"

Well, speaking generally, here are some of the reasons I've seen people 
run two NICS on the same physical network:

-   Redundancy for NIC failure.  This is often combined with a second 
physical layer network, but that's not always feasible.

-  Configuration requirements.   Sometimes there are compatibility 
issues associated with running multiple protocols on the same card, 
sometimes there are configuration differences.  For example, one might 
want to run jumbo frames on a gig card to connect to a backup server, 
but need to limit MTU on connections headed to the outside world via 
external VPN.  You can't always do what you need to with aliases on a 
single card.

-  Traffic control/accounting.  Statistics and SNMP counters usually 
run against the physical interface rather than the IP address, so if 
you need accounting for separate networks (for utilization reports, 
billing, etc.) it can be desirable to have multiple NICS in the same 
box.

-  Load balancing/teaming.  Via MLPPP or other teaming technology, you 
might have several 100MB connections teamed out of the same box to a 
switch with a faster uplink to the destination.  The ARP issue 
mentioned will still occur even though each NIC has it's own dedicated 
100MB duplex connection.

I'm sure there are others out there as well.

KeS


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