4-port Router NIC (Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+) Question
 

Anyone,

I am fairly new to Linux (Fedora 3/4), but I am having a networking issue and was wondering if someone could give me some insight. I recently purchased a "4-Port 10/100Mbps Nway Switch Router PCI Card" from Computer Geeks. I am trying to get it working on my Fedora box. I have installed the card, but didn't install any drivers. It shows up in lspci as "02:07.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)". My questions are:

1. Do I need to install any special drivers to make this work properly?

2. This is a 4 port card, but I am only seeing eth1 showing up for this card (1 MAC address). Should there be four Mac addresses, since there are 4 ports? If so, how to I get it to recognize the other 3, so I can configure them? If not, how do I configure 1 MAC address with 4 different IP addresses?


Thanks for any help,

09-Sparky

I suspect from the products name that this isn't a 4 port network card. But is infact a 1 port network card combined with a 4 port switch.

If your looking for a true 4 port network card then you'll need something like this:
http://www.intel.com/network/connect...er_adapter.htm

(We have one of these babies in one of our servers hooked up to a gigabyte 3com switch with link aggregation for a total bandwidth of 4 gigabytes)

you are probably correct. If so, is there anyway to define separate IP addresses to 4 ports? I have already purchased this card and would like to use it if possible. I may be out of luck, but if so, what is the purpose of this card?

Its like having a 4 port switch bolted into your Server with an extra internal port which is connected to the server. You could plug 4 workstations into it for instance, and have a mini lan without an internal switch.

If the 'switch' supports vlans and you can set the port to the server up as an 802.1q trunk then you could still achieve 4 separate subnets using the vlan drivers, but it depends on the capabilites of what you have bought.

The card I think you intended to buy would appear to the server as 4 separate nics yes?

I am thinking that this card isn't going to do what I want. You are correct, I was looking for 1 card that could act as 4 seperate Nics. I actually want to use it to monitor 3 seperate networks, as this box is acting as my IDS. I want to put them all in Promisc mode, but when I try it now, I think I am creating a loop, which would act as a security risk, correct Thanks for the help.