Can two ethernet ports works simltaneously

[naveenkumar]

Hello,
My name is Naveen Kumar
I am presently working with a Single Board Computer whih 2 on board ehternet ports.I am using RHEL 5.0 . i am not able to work with two ehternet ports simultaneously . i.e, i am able to configure both the ports but only one port i am able to use. Please claryfy me about this issue.
Regards
Naveen Kumar I

 

[eibgrad]

If both Ethernet ports are configured for the SAME subnet (e.g., 192.168.1.x), then only one will be ever be used. IOW, once a network connection is found to provide access to a given resource, the OS will not arbitrarily choose the other. Most OSes will let you prioritize one network connection over the other, but again, once chosen, it will use that network connection exclusively.

The obvious way to make the OS use BOTH network connections is to configure them such a way that it MUST use both because the resources you need to access are EXCLUSIVE to one or the other. And that would happen, for example, if each network connection was on a DIFFERENT subnet (e.g., 192.168.1.x and 192.168.2.x).

 

[kaa0653]

If you are looking to use both NICs in parallel, link aggregation may be what you are looking for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

As far as configuring this goes, I just begining with UNIX/Linux so I don't know what needs to be done. A quick search online found many articles on this though. There may also be someone else here that knows.