Two NICs Two Different Jobs

[Toxcity]

Good Afternoon all, long time no speak.

I am working on my server at the moment and after the recent amount of bandwidth being taken by internet users I decided I wanted to setup the second NIC for LAN.

Now, the idea is that one NIC runs all internet connections (FTP, Game Servers and websites) and the second NIC is for File Sharing and streaming across the LAN.

I have tried a few things.

- Blocked all outbound connections from LAN NIC

- Disabled DNS on LAN NIC

- Disabled File Sharing on WAN NIC

But still I get a huge amount of packets coming into the LAN NIC as well as a loss of LAN file sharing.

Metrics are set to:

WAN NIC = 2

LAN NIC = 3

Which may explain the loss of file sharing.

If anyone has any ideas please give them a post. Doesn't seem to be a huge amount on this on google other than people with home computers which would not benifit from the extra line.

Thanks!

- Tox

 

[Toxcity]

Bump, I know it is a lot to read but surely someone has an idea?

 

[JN]

Well i'd probably look into IP binding for each of the services you want to run on the machine. For example most game servers can be told to only run on _this_ IP which effectively binds all of their traffic to the network card assigned that IP.

Same goes for most other network based applications and windows services. All can be bound to an IP. Sometimes it's not that easy to do tho.

 

[Toxcity]

Mmm, ill have a look into it. Know a good place to start looking?

 

[JN]

Mmm, ill have a look into it. Know a good place to start looking?

You'll have to take it one application at a time. Depending on what game, ftp, web, and file servers you are running the option could be in a settings menu, in an ini file or a windows command.

 

[Toxcity]

Thanks Jim, in your first post you mentioned Windows Services. I think this would be a good place to start.

Do you know how to bind a NIC to them? Naturally I wdant all Local File Sharing on one NIC and internet services on the other.

The defualt gateway on both NICs is 192.168.1.1.

I though I had cracked it but the connection between the server and the other machines in the house seems to keep disappearing.

So at the moment it is either one NIC or the other. Which is not what I want.

 

[JN]

Hmm...did windows give you a warning message when setting both NIC's to the same gateway? Last time i checked (Win2K3) you couldn't have two NIC's with same gateway without experiencing 'issues'.

 

[Toxcity]

Yep, gave me a nice warning. But on the current network there is no other way.

Logically, I cannot see a problem since both NICs have their own IP/MAC so routing is easy. But setting it up server side is the issue.

 

[JN]

Two NIC's with default gateways set causes big and often random problems in my experience. Have you considered bonding the two nic's to make them one (with twice the throughput)? You wouldn't be separating the traffic like you want to, but at least you'd have the combined bandwidth of both cards available to any application that needs it.

 

[Toxcity]

Well, that is the other option. Once again I have no idea of how to do this.

I attempted a network bridge.. but couldn't get that to do anything useful.

Haven't you got the OC3D servers running on two NICs? You knowledge would be greatly appreciated.

 

[JN]

Well, that is the other option. Once again I have no idea of how to do this.

I attempted a network bridge.. but couldn't get that to do anything useful.

Haven't you got the OC3D servers running on two NICs? You knowledge would be greatly appreciated.

Yeah the new server is actually running on 3 NIC's - all bonded, but its also on Linux so an entirely different ball game.

Although I've only played with it in windows, my understanding is that you simply select both NIC's in control panel, right click, chose 'create bond' or something to that effect, then it creates a single 'bonded' nic which acts exactly like a normal nic but will have the combined throughput (200mbps / 2gbps...etc)

 

[Toxcity]

Mmm, ill have a look.

EDIT: Option doesn't seem to be there.

 

[Toxcity]

Warning - Multiply Default gateways are intended to provide redundancy to a single network. They will not function when the g3ateways are on two different disjointed networks.

Any ideas what this is supposed to mean? Confuses me.

The warning comes up when the gateway is the same and when the gateway is different. Makes no sense.

 

[Freak]

could you remove all the settings from one card. And then try it again.

Or you might have to bond the cards and then set all the network crap???

- Got no idea, but seems a logical thing to say ;D

 

[Toxcity]

Well, working all yesterday on this little "project" and it seems the network cards are too old to team. They basically don't support it.

I have got rid of the default gateway on the LAN connection as you can only have one.

To an extent it is working.. but not fully. Across the LAN connection everything seems to work.. but remote desktop and a media server seem to switch between the two connect each time they are started.

Internet seems to be working fine on the wide connection so far.

 

[Toxcity]

Right guys!

QoS ring any bells? I have no idea how to configure it but would it be possible to use QoS to map network services to an interface?

Cheers!

 

[JN]

Right guys!

QoS ring any bells? I have no idea how to configure it but would it be possible to use QoS to map network services to an interface?

Cheers!

Not as far as I'm aware - but I could be wrong.

If you're really so adamant in separating them, why not set up your server as a VMWare/Citrix virtualisation server and run two separate OS's on there. That way you can assign an adapter to each virtual server?

 

[Toxcity]

Mmm, could do. But I worry about the resources that will taken up.

Thanks for all the help.

I guess it was an impossible task?

 

[Ham]

V-lans or just upgrade the lot too gigabit ethernet?

 

[JN]

Mmm, could do. But I worry on the resources that will take up.

Thanks for all the help.

I guess it was an impossible task?

VMWare ESXi takes up about 100MB Ram and 30MB HDD space, but requires an Intel (or other high-end) network card to run

Citrix XenServer takes up about 700MB Ram and 1GB HDD space and will work with any hardware supported by Redhat (pretty much).

Depends what spec ur server is really. You could make more use of the available resources this way....or just use resources you've not got.