Dual-port NIC

Andrew Andrew
Tue Oct 15 14:46:57 BST 2002


Thanks to everyone for ther advice. Unfortunately...

[snip]
> I guess it's an older 10/100 card, with two seperate
> tranceivers and codecs for 10 and 100 Mbit/s operations. If you look
> closely at the PCB, you might find space for a BNC connector for 10Base2
> (cheapernet), if my theory is right.

You're right - it has a 10Mb, 100Mb, and BNC sockets.

[snip]
> Under this theory, your card has only one controller, and thus can operate
> at either 10 or 100 Mbit/s, and use only one of the ports at a time.

Exactly. This is what I've found by playing around - I just wondered whether
my card had any hidden capabilities.

> I've looked on the web but can't find any info on dual-port cards.
>
> That's because there aren't (to the best of my knowledge) any multi-port
> controller chips; the multi-port cards have a PCI-PCI bridge and a couple
> of seperate controllers on them. Accordingly, to FreeBSD (or most other
> OSes) they seem to be completely different controllers, as if they were on
> seperate cards. So if your board were a dual-port NIC, you would have a
> de0 and de1 interface (ifconfig -a will show).
>
This is what I would have expected to see. But I only get de0 on
boot/ifconfig.
At least I know it's not broken - I wondered why our IT dept. weren't too
bothered about giving this one up to a poor lad like me...

Ah well - it's still a nice card and more than enough for my needs.
Thanks to everyone for chipping in with their thoughts.

Best wishes,

Andrew





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