a lot of traffic on an unused nic

phobox · 12-28-2003, 11:49 AM

Hi, I have a knoppix debian hd install and I have 2 nics in my system. Eth1 is connected to the lan and is handing out the dhcp, eth0 is not connected to anything. However, my ifconfig says I have so far transferred 252 MiB from eth0, and only 1 MiB from eth1. It has only been up for a few days. There is no internet connection to it, although there is one computer on the lan which is dialed in to an ISP periodically. What is going on?

itsjustme · 12-28-2003, 12:10 PM

Sounds like eth0 and eth1 are actually eth1 and eth0.

Have you confirmed which is which from their MAC addresses?

I'm not sure, but maybe the disconnected NIC is getting hits from the system looking to see if it is active.

What's a "MiB"? Is that Million Bytes, or something? Do you mean MB, megabytes?

phobox · 12-28-2003, 12:17 PM

Actually, eth0 was the dhcp nic until I put in the 2nd nic, but I had to shut down to put it in, and ifconfig totals don't carry over on a reboot do they? And even if it were switched around, isn't that a lot of traffic for only dhcp stuff? (there are 3 computers on the lan)

ugge · 12-28-2003, 05:58 PM

All kinds of broadcast traffic run in the network, ranging from DHCP requests to ARP. On top of this there might other network protocols traveling the network for things like file sharing, name lookups etc.

Why bother to setup the NIC if it isn't connected?
Just tell it not to bring up that interface on boot. (GUI being the easiest way)