I'm looking for ways to increase bandwidth to my Linux machine, which functions as a fileserver.

Is it possible to use TWO NIC's to balance the bandwidth load on the same network?

Is there any other way to increase bandwidth, besides using gigabit.

Thanks for any help in advance

I am using Fedora Core 2, and have 3 extra NIC's avaialble (if it makes any difference)
Also, i am using Samba for filesharing between by linux box, and my windows machines.

BUMP.

yes you can use as many nics as you want. For what I understand in Debian you just add eth1 eth2 eth3 etc to the conf file. I am not sure which file. I haven't used debian for a while.

It wont really help.
The principle is that your taking up as much possible bandwidth from your gateway as possible. In simple home network configurations, this means that no matter how many interfaces you have pulling data, the aggregate bandwidth will still remain the same.

The bottleneck lies at the gateway, not at the client.

In some certain cases, using multiple nic's would be benefficial, however. For instance, if you're supplied an on campus connection at a local university, which may enforce some packet shaper or rate limiting policies, then bridging two limited network connections together would increase the total bandwidth available.
When I say "bridging" I dont mean bridging in the traditional sense, but rather the "winXP" sense (shutter).

If you just want to help your connection in a different way
here:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/ADSL-Bandw...WTO/index.html
(assuming you're using dsl/cable)

Well, in this case the gatewat is not the bottleneck.

Gateway connects to router using gigbit to a single gigbit connection on the router.

That's why this would be beneficial.

Is the LAN behind gateway gigabit?

If the extra NIC's are gigabit too, and the distance between Fedora-based server and 2-3 of windows boxes is small, you can use extra NIC's to make direct connections between server and clients, in this case fedora will act for this boxes as gateway to LAN that you have at present, but if the most trafic is generated by samba, benefit will be a personal gigabit link for some clients and more bandwidth for others
Well... actually I think there no botleneck in the schema, that you posted... but... the choice is your... :-)

P.S. Sorry for my bad english.

Hi try Ethernet Bonding, will probably need a Kernel recompile though as its not standard.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/marcelo/linux-2.4/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt

Hth

Murk