Network Bridge

Soldato
Joined
23 Mar 2005
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3,887
Right - Since my DFI Lanparty NF4 Sli-DR has 2*1Gb network connections I thought I would be clever and connect them up and create a 2Gb connection (the downstairs machine has the same so it seemed plausible.)

I have a Belkin Gigabit/125mbit wireless router that I hook my machine into via the 2 network cables. Both Local Area Connections show up as working at 1Gb, but the bridge shows at 1Gb - Am I limited by the switch? Surely with 2 connections it should be able to deal with the 2 streams of data at 1Gb each - shouldn't the Windows software then deal with creating the 2 streams of 1Gb a piece? <- That's what I thought the bridge was all about? Like binding connections in the old days?

(Is it worth sending a big file to see what it's doing?) - is there a network speed checker out there that's easy to use? (Sandra SiSoft perhaps?)
 
It won't work - neither your switch nor Windows will trivially handle binding two connections.

cavemanoc said:
That's what I thought the bridge was all about?

Nope. "The bridge" is about connecting two networks together through the one machine.
 
Ahaaaa... So If I had one network running on the Nvidia Connection and another on the Marvell - bridging them would allow machines on the two seperate networks to talk to each other?

I'm sure I was involved in a thread about binding connections a while back - what sort of software is required to do it?
 
cavemanoc said:
Ahaaaa... So If I had one network running on the Nvidia Connection and another on the Marvell - bridging them would allow machines on the two seperate networks to talk to each other?

I'm sure I was involved in a thread about binding connections a while back - what sort of software is required to do it?
It's more a question of hardware required to do it. You need adapters that support network teaming, which are usually only server-type adapters, which are more expensive than your average network card.
 
Is that because the processor overhead would be too high? I remember we use to be able to bind two analogue modem connections without too much hastle and that was a software thing? Pity really - not much use but would be a bit of fun!

Edit: Something like what he did Here ?

Liked this as it was a reasonable start point:

Another method for providing fault tolerance is by making sure that automatic bridging is enabled. This feature is available on Windows hosts only and is enabled by default. For more information, see Configuring Bridged Networking Options on a Windows Host. This method is more limited than using NIC teaming, as it does not allow for load balancing, switch fault tolerance, fault tolerance to any necessary services running on the host or the ability to specify an adapter as the primary or secondary adapter.

This sums up the issue for me - I don't care about redundancy or fault torerance. I have 2 machines that'll share the odd file, all I need is software that will do the Load Balancing across two cards - shouldn't be that hard if you don't care about hardware fault tolerance?
 
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Isn't this covered by Microsoft Windows NT Load Balancing Service (WLBS)?

Linky

I don't need most of what they offer, but one of the services is a Software solution to load-balancing - seems like a possible answer?

WLBS is intended primarily to load-balance incoming TCP/IP traffic
 
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