hi, this is probably a stupid question. i have googled but i cant really seem to find the answer to this. im almost positve that its not possible, im going to ask anyway though. i have 2 cable lines running into my house - 2 monthly bills. one is in my room, and the other the rest of my family shares on a router. would it be possble to put 2 NIC cards into a PC, or, some sort of wireless plugin thing + a NIC card, and effectively have 2 cable connections running into my PC? this could in theory double my bandwith (although if its even possible, im kind of doubting that). thanks for any help.

I heard someone from school talk about the same yesterday. He found that his neighbour had a 4mbit DSL line, on an unprotected wifi line. So he installed Linux on both to setup some sort of load balancing between them.

From what he said, there should be a possibility. But to be honest, I'm not sure if that's possible.

Toolmaker

You can have as many connections as the number of NICs you can pack into your box.

I'm no expert, but...

The two cards will have different IPs. So it is doubtful that you can get a better quake ping or whatever. It may be possible to use the two cards for seperate purposes, each having their own bandwidth. Like I said, I'm no expert, but I imagine there's a way to configure which outbound ip/ports get bound to which card.

Quote:

Original post by graveyard filla hi, this is probably a stupid question. i have googled but i cant really seem to find the answer to this. im almost positve that its not possible, im going to ask anyway though. i have 2 cable lines running into my house - 2 monthly bills. one is in my room, and the other the rest of my family shares on a router. would it be possble to put 2 NIC cards into a PC, or, some sort of wireless plugin thing + a NIC card, and effectively have 2 cable connections running into my PC? this could in theory double my bandwith (although if its even possible, im kind of doubting that). thanks for any help.

In windows there is an option to "Bridge Connections" - basically making two or more connections act as one - so yes this is possible. Here's the MSDN refrence with links at bottom containing additional info. I hope it is what you are looking for!

- Drew

You can put the NICs in your box but I'm next to positive you won't see any connection speed increase.

EDIT: See above post for just how wrong I am :)

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Original post by CyberSlag5k You can put the NICs in your box but I'm next to positive you won't see any connection speed increase.

You will if you manage your bandwidth right. Simultaneous downloads from sites will go faster as well as uploads. Maybe there's even a specialized BitTorrent client to take advantage of multiple connections.

hey guys,

thanks for the replies. by the way, this is for the server to my online RPG. i am going to put togeather a PC for it and run it as a dedicate server. i was hoping i could double my upload rate (and max amount of users!) by doing this. im not sure how well it will work though using 2 different IPs.. im going to have to read into the bridge connection thing.

thanks for anymore help.

I don't think the actual download speed would be doubled (like, downloading a single file from a server won't go twice as fast). You'll get "parallelization" of your connections. I think you can achieve that with some clever load balancing with OpenBSD's packetfilter: see here. Other systems might support other load balancing/connection sharing techniques, but I'm not familiar with them.
The result would most probably be that loading a website for example would not 'technically' go twice as fast, but rather like 2 things at the same time through different connections: resulting in a connection that potantially 'practically' can be twice as fast.

Each NIC has its own IP. One machine and 2 connections using some sort of load balancing software could effectively increase your thruput, but the client software would have to be able to process a message from your server saying "this line is full! try this other IP".

ClientA connects to x.x.x.x and begins download
ClientB connects to x.x.x.x and receives message "line is in use, try y.y.y.y"
ClientB disconnects from x.x.x.x
ClientB reconnects to y.y.y.y and begins download
ClientC connects to x.x.x.x and begins download
ClientD connects to x.x.x.x and receives message "line is in use, try y.y.y.y"
ClientD connects to y.y.y.y and begins download


So you would have to program your client software to do this.

Downloading stuff can be doubled though, because separate requests can be sent through both lines, on a bridged connection. They used to do this with modems, they called it shotgunning.

[Edited by - bit64 on January 12, 2005 8:07:49 PM]