One server, 2 Ethernet Cards?

[geekindisguise]

I had an extra ethernet card laying around and thought maybe I could put it in my server and have it setup so that one card is used for my Internet Browsing, and the other card setup for the webserver only. So, how would I do this?
I already have them both in, but I looked at the status of the connection, and my new card just says Local and the old card said Internet. Anyone know how to make one work only for the Server and the other work only for Internet Browsing?
I am on a Vista Home Premium PC by the way.

Thanks!

 

[angelwatt]

I don't believe that's possible.

 

[geekindisguise]

I don't believe that's possible.

What about just using both at the same time and having the computer automatically balance the load to make my website and my internet load faster?

 

[angelwatt]

What about just using both at the same time and having the computer automatically balance the load to make my website and my internet load faster?

When using more than one you're generally trying to connect to multiple devices, not multiple connections to the same device.

Here's a Linux thread where someone was trying what you want, but don't believe it ever worked correctly.

 

[rowsdower]

What about just using both at the same time and having the computer automatically balance the load to make my website and my internet load faster?

Some operating systems and switches allow bonding two connections together in order to double the available bandwidth. I have no idea if Windows (especially a Home version) can do this. Your ethernet card is probably not the bottleneck anyway.

 

[ChrisA]

I had an extra ethernet card laying around and thought maybe I could put it in my server and have it setup so that one card is used for my Internet Browsing, and the other card setup for the webserver only. So, how would I do this?

This is a VERY common server setup. In fact high end servers typically come with 2 or 4 ethernet interfaces. If you are using a computer as a router you will NEED multiple cards.

I don't know how to use the Mac's point and click interface but the command, from the terminal or more likely from a startup boot script, the command is "ifconfig".

I think on a Mac you can set the IP addresses in Preferences. from in the apache config file you set the ip to match.

EDIT: I just read you are using Window. Why post the question here? THe best OS for doing what you want is Solaris, BSD or Linux. Windows is for games.

 

[blaster_boy]

I don't really understand what you are trying to do : do you have a laptop and a server and have added a additional network card to the server ?

One card to your internal network and one card to your internet ? Then you need a command called 'route' or the graphical equivalent to it to manage the routing table. This tells your server to route which information where. When your laptop needs to connect to the internet and the laptop enters via the internal network card on your server (lets assume you connected the laptop via ethernet cable to your server) you tell the server to route any internet destination packets to the external network card and vice versa.

In this way, your server is doing the routing, and you limit what can go where.

If you want to load-balance connections, this is done in another way : you have two servers who can take the load of the connections, which for the user have the same ip address (which is managed by a router in front of the servers).

Are you trying to do something else still ?

 

[NoNameBrand]

Of course it's possible. However, if your single ethernet card is faster than your internet connection, it won't do you a bit of good, as your computer's networking equipment isn't the bottleneck.

 

[uberamd]

This is a VERY common server setup. In fact high end servers typically come with 2 or 4 ethernet interfaces.

This is true, however they usually hook up to different networks and a load balancer distributes the traffic to one of the network ports. Or, you can have each port going to a different network, and provide different services to each network. However for web browsing, its pointless.

I do believe you can have 2 network connections coming into your house (DLS and Cable for example) then use a hardware firewall like smoothwall to join the connections together, not sure how well that works though.