*BSD News Article 86443


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Date: 12 Jan 1997 19:52:00 +0100
From: mschmidt@me-tech.PFM-Mainz.de (Michael Schmidt)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
Message-ID: <6OhJND_6NgB@me-tech.PFM-Mainz.de>
References: <6OBfLaMbNgB@me-tech.pfm-mainz.de>
	<6OVunZMMNgB@me-tech.pfm-mainz.de>
	<5b05fe$4aj@innocence.interface-business.de>
	<6OW5ep16NgB@me-tech.pfm-mainz.de> <5b6eop$o0h@uriah.heep.sax.de>
Subject: Re: Running several networking cards in one system?
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Organization: ME Technology
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.misc:1886 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:5541 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:33794 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:5106

  In article  <5b6eop$o0h@uriah.heep.sax.de>
              j@uriah.heep.sax.de   (J Wunsch)
  wrote:

> mschmidt@me-tech.PFM-Mainz.de (Michael Schmidt) wrote:
> > With load balancing I mean that the drivers or administering
> > processes of the system (FLEET in QNX) check which networking card
> > is under more load than the other ones and then balance the load and
> > distribute the network traffic among the networking cards.
>
> That's fairly pointless, since the bottleneck is typically the wire,
> not the NIC, at least for 10 Mbit/s ethernet.

It may look pointless to you as it seems that you missed the point. In the  
mentioned setup each NIC has to have a separate wire/cable (goes without  
saying, didn't explicitly mention it), administering processes check traffic,  
when balancing they distribute the load/traffic of a machine to several NICs  
in this machine and therefore to different wires/cables, the bottleneck issue  
decreases.

> No, you can't do this in BSD.  Eache interface (network card) needs a
> distinct IP address.

Who has told BSD could do it?  I have written to think of a comparison of an  
other system to BSD, if BSD can't do this then it can't do it. So what?
IP isn't always a point in certain contexts.

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Michael Schmidt    |    mschmidt@me-tech.pfm-mainz.de
ME Technology      |              Fax ++49 +6741 7126
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