Best way to incorporate Two nics for two towers

[Camel]

I have one tower I use for an active unraid server for movies, back up jobs, TM, and storage.

 

I have another tower I would like to use as a backup of my first tower.

 

Each tower has one 100mbs nic and one 1000mbs nic. I have tried to use the nics in different ways and I am not sure if I know how these nics are functioning or how to configure them.

 

I have activated all the nics connected to a gig switch. Then I decided (thinking I could) to connect the 100mb nics to each other with a crossover cable moving dedicated data between the two towers and keep the 1000mb connected to the gig switch for network data.

 

It seems when I have all four nics connected and active, the tower's web gui shows no ip, mask, or gateway info but has dns values. Sometimes, the towers will lose their dns and/or gateway info even when I force the info with command line on the console. Thereby, having to restart the servers with single nic activity.

In my frustration I have kept only the gig nics active to avoid confusion with the towers communicating.

 

I read mostly, that it is best to just have one nic per machine. But I would like to explore this further if it is possible.

 

Is it possible to have dedicated nics for tower to tower data transfer while having nics connected just for the switch data? And how could I observe nic's activity to confirm correct data transfers?

 

 

What is the best way to configure these nics and how can I observe their activity? Any advice or links to other threads would be greatly appreciated.

 

Camel

[dgaschk]

unRAID only activates the first NIC it finds. Additional NICs must be manually configured. You can connect the servers directly as you describe. You can confirm correct data transfer by comparing the files on the servers.

[Camel]

Maybe I should have posted in 'user customizations', where can I find how to use manual configs for the nics?

 

Thanks,

camel

[WeeboTech]

A few questions.

 

1. What kind of data is private from server to server?

2. How much data?

3. Does it warrant being private based on the slower speed of these nics?

 

I ask because for the amount of work involved, does the extra 10-11MB/s private data warrant the effort and is there a problem that is trying to be solved. Is that bandwidth enough for the task? vs using the Gigabit path which can reach upwards of 30MB/s.

 

Next thing is, do you have a DHCP server which is capable of assigning addresses based on MAC address?

 

Also look at /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf

You will need to adjust the block manually or with sed script lines.

 

# Config information for eth1:
IPADDR[1]=""
NETMASK[1]=""
USE_DHCP[1]=""
DHCP_HOSTNAME[1]=""

 

then run /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart

 

unfortunately. limetech does the assignment of variables for eth0 early in the process so there is no way to stick the assignments into /boot/config/network.cfg

 

I.E. at /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 top of script

fromdos </boot/config/network.cfg >/var/tmp/network.cfg
source /var/tmp/network.cfg

 

There might be a way to insert script commands into the /boot/config/network.cfg script.

But they will probably be lost the next time you adjust any of the network parameters.