Topic: nic upgrade

[Dave Conzatti]

for the past 2 years ive been running my network at 10mbit, cards, hubs everything running at that speed, and using a esmith box as a gateway.
recently i got myself a new laptop "wireless" so i got myself a router/accesspoint, and it runs at 100mbit, so i figure now is the time to upgrade everything else to 100mbit. i have two 10mbit cards running in the esmith server. i plan on turning this into a server only and yanking out both cards and putting in one 100mbit card.

should i

A. yank out the old cards put in the new one, and reconfigure it for the one card?
or
B. add in the new card, reconfigure it, then yank the old cards?

i was also wondering ive done alot of work with novell servers, and i know you can link cards togeather to get more bandwidth to the server 200/400mbit for example using 2 cards apose to 100/200mbit using one. is this posable with the esmith server?

thanks in advance.
dave

[Steve Bush]

I would just hang the wireless router on the internal network.  Configure it to be a wireless bridge and leave the SME server as the Internet gateway.

If you want more speed internally, swap out the internal 10mb card for a 100mb one, purchase a 10/100mb network switch and you should notice a pretty good speed improvement on 100mb wired PC's.  Your wireless network is probably limited to 11mb, so I don't think you'll see that big an improvement.....

I haven't looked at Linux drivers, but Intel and 3com both have software that combines two NIC's or a dual port NIC to increase the bandwidth for Windows/Netware (like you mentioned).  You would likely need to add the drivers to the stock SME server to get this to work.