Hi everyone
i have an Asus x79 motherboard that has two ethernet ports on my workstation and i wonder what i can do to take advantage of them. things like load balancing traffic and redundancy.. has any one experience in those kind of things?
Leave it be until you need it windows gets confused by double connections
To really take advantage of it I think you'd need a layer 3 switch that can setup link aggregation. This is when you use multiple hardware links and create a larger virtual link. Then you'd need to setup link aggregation within Windows.
You need a managed switch if you want to set up link aggregation, but there's not much use unless you have multiple clients accessing the computer and you're saturating a single link speed.
There are other things you can do with it, for example you could have one connected to the internet and the other to a local only network. Stuff like that.
Plug them into each other then call your ISP and tell them your internet isn't working.
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Only thing I can suggest is this, because it's all I have experience with:-
Get pfsense installed and you can load balance. Get two modems (or modem/routers in modem only mode), and follow a few online guides to set up sensible load balancing and QoS rules (or borrow someone else's).
I used to have line bonding of ADSL2+ (two connections at 11Mb) and also load balancing later on. If you want proper bonding you need the ISP equipment to be working on the exchange and home side, but load balancing is awesome if you use multhreaded/multiconnection services like usenet.
The business I used to work for had a office just outside London, and it was in a fibre blackspot area, so load balancing with a cheap old pfsense PC was awesome for their particular needs... If one connection was being destroyed with uploading a massive data file, it would fall back on the spare lines.
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it is a little late, but thank you wizen for your respons :)