On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 01:06:29PM +1000, Damon Muller wrote: | Quoth Ron Farrer, | > I'm building a firewall out of an old 486 and was wondering if it was | > best to use two NICs of the same type/brand or to use different ones? Is | > there any gotchas for doing one over the other? | | I find that's it's easier to use two different cards (not just different | brands, but different chipsets) because you can easily dictate which one | will be eth0 and eth1 in /etc/modules.conf. | | Using the same brands will certainly work, but you'll probably end up | juggling them around to work out which one is which.
I have 2 tulip cards in this machine (it is my workstation and also gateway for DSL) and I could pick which was which by which PCI slot they were in. The kernel picks it based on the id number. I agree that using different chipsets (regardless of brand) is easier because you can set/switch it with aliases in /etc/modules.conf, but I haven't had any problems with this setup. -D