Dual NIC adapter settings 1

[polar1]

I have heard that with dual NIC cards with 2 I/P addresses (NT 4.0) that the subnets are linked (somehow). I am new to this. I have had a problem backing up 2 NT 4.0 servers. In the course of the backup it would fail with a message from Dr.Watson that the service has stopped with access failure.
I noticed that on one NIC card the adapter settings were 100/Full and on the other was autosense/autosense. I changed
them both to 100/full (the switch is set for that) and my problem so far has gone away.

Does this make sense?

 

[Jpoandl]

I use two NICs very often on my NT servers; however, normally I do this to get a higher level of network fault tolerance and better throughput. I use NIC teaming. If one NIC fails or the connection breaks on one port, the other port will still work. This provides a measure of network fault tolerance. In this meathod, you will only have one IP address.

See this for more info:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q197/9/91.ASP

However, what you are doing is called a Multihomed server. I guess the two IP addresses assigned to this server are on two different segments? Usually this is done to use the NT server as a gateway to another network. For example, one NIC will connect to something like 10.2.3.0 and the other nic will connect to segment 120.34.32.0 In this way, the server act much like a router. It connects to two networks together.

Your backup problem may be unrelated to your NIC configurations...I would image though it is best to have the NICs configured for the same settings if the switch that it connects to is compatable. Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2000