Topic: SME Server with 2 local Network Cards

[shawnbishop]

Good Day

I was wondering, How do I get an SME Server with 2 network cards to have 2 local IP addresses...??

The reason is :

We are a design house which uses SME server as a file server, we have about 60 users, now 10 of those users need to access the machine on their separate IP address range eg 172.168.0.0 to obtain drawings.

The rest of the users are on a 192.168.0.0 range...

I want to assign two IP addresses to the box, eg 172.168.0.1 / and 192.168.0.1 so that the 10 rendering users access the machine on their own "network"

Thnaks

[cactus]

Good Day

I was wondering, How do I get an SME Server with 2 network cards to have 2 local IP addresses...??

The reason is :

We are a design house which uses SME server as a file server, we have about 60 users, now 10 of those users need to access the machine on their separate IP address range eg 172.168.0.0 to obtain drawings.

The rest of the users are on a 192.168.0.0 range...

I want to assign two IP addresses to the box, eg 172.168.0.1 / and 192.168.0.1 so that the 10 rendering users access the machine on their own "network"

Thnaks

How about adding a second local network for the 172.168. network?

[shawnbishop]

I want the two network to be physically seperate by 2 network cards due to the amount of traffic the 10 designers and rendering department generate.

So the Design / render department can connect on a seperate network....

and the Normal users can access the same info on their own network...

[imcintyre]

When I read your post, I wondered if your solution would actually work or if the hard drives or something else like cabling, switch, router or WAP is the real bottle neck. I thought I would poke around a bit.

Sorry, can't answer your question definitively but approx 6 months - 1 year ago some posts about adding a 3rd NIC card for an sme server in gateway mode see here

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=39269.0

I know that this is not directly analogous to your request but you may want to search around for 3rd nic or something like that. I think the main reason I saw for the 3rd nic request was to provide for an optional dmz area. The upshot of this at the time was that it was a no go.

Wikipedia claims HDD fastest sequential throughput of 125 MB/s which should be equivalent to a 1Gb lan card. The info quoted claimed this was possible with 10k to 15k rpm discs, which I think will be scsi. You may want to look at what discs you have. Perhaps an upgrade to your network hardware would generate useful speed increases. It might be cheaper than the extra hardware associated with installing/rewiring to get two separate physical networks.

You may want to review

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=40641.0

. This seems to be a way to install a third card with the server virtualized. I have done some very preliminary virtualization but am not able to say if this would accomplish what you want.

Another solution which you may have considered would be the addition/creation of an "Engineering Server" either on the same network or not. The first would be helpful if the constraint is not bandwidth.

Hope that this is helpful.   

[thomasch]

Shawnbishop,

If your SME in server only mode maybe you should try two gigabit NIC in bonding mode.
You'll need two exact NIC of same brand & model.
It will speed up your LAN.

thomas

[cactus]

If your SME in server only mode maybe you should try two gigabit NIC in bonding mode.
You'll need two exact NIC of same brand & model.
It will speed up your LAN.

Provided that everything in between server and client is also capable of the higher speeds, normally this tends to end at another bottleneck in the chain like imcintyre said.

[kiasu]

I have a similar situation.

I have two departments. One is for the main staff and they are in a Win2003 domain, however we have a call centre  made up of temp staff who I do not want on the main domain.

I was trying to utilise some of my old NT4 licences to do this and adding two NICs and setting up two internal IP structures is possible with this, however no body writes current anti-trojan/worm software anymore for NT4 so it looks like SME server will be the solution. No issues installing. Very quick and easy. But now I go to set up the two NICs so that the supervisors of the call centre can update files on the SME server on the NIC configed to 192.168.8.* and I want to create a new ip range for the telemarketers network, but can't 

What to do? I may have to look at Suse or....Win2003