Heya,
If you want to be really clever then you can use what's known as bonding. This happens when you have two cards such as a Intel and a Tulip-Driven which can pair up to produce a single virtual card.
i.e. eth0 + eth1 = bond0.
Here, if both cards were at 100 MBit then you would have a 200 MBit virtual connection. The same would have for 3 cards or 4 cards.
i.e. eth0 (100) + eth1 (100) + eth2 (100) + eth3 (100) = bond0 (400)
This needs to have bonding support in the kernel (> v2.4 I think - please correct me if necessary) and the card drivers must also support bonding as per the ones above.
HOWTO:
Also see the following section on the module parameters. You will need to add
at least the following line to /etc/conf.modules (or /etc/modules.conf):
alias bond0 bonding
Use standard distribution techniques to define bond0 network interface. For
example, on modern RedHat distributions, create ifcfg-bond0 file in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory that looks like this:
DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=192.168.1.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.1.0
BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
USERCTL=no
(put the appropriate values for you network instead of 192.168.1).
All interfaces that are part of the trunk, should have SLAVE and MASTER
definitions. For example, in the case of RedHat, if you wish to make eth0 and
eth1 (or other interfaces) a part of the bonding interface bond0, their config
files (ifcfg-eth0, ifcfg-eth1, etc.) should look like this:
DEVICE=eth0
USERCTL=no
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
(use DEVICE=eth1 for eth1 and MASTER=bond1 for bond1 if you have configured
second bonding interface).
Restart the networking subsystem or just bring up the bonding device if your
administration tools allow it. Otherwise, reboot. (For the case of RedHat
distros, you can do ifup bond0' or /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart'.)
If the administration tools of your distribution do not support master/slave
notation in configuration of network interfaces, you will need to configure
the bonding device with the following commands manually:
# /sbin/ifconfig bond0 192.168.1.1 up
# /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth0
# /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth1
(substitute 192.168.1.1 with your IP address and add custom network and ustom
netmask to the arguments of ifconfig if required).
You can then create a script with these commands and put it into the appropriate
rc directory.
If you specifically need that all your network drivers are loaded before the
bonding driver, use one of modutils' powerful features : in your modules.conf,
tell that when asked for bond0, modprobe should first load all your interfaces :
probeall bond0 eth0 eth1 bonding
Be careful not to reference bond0 itself at the end of the line, or modprobe will
die in an endless recursive loop.
I hope that this has been of some help!
Iain
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