I noticed that all my Dell Power Edge 2950 servers running RHEL or CENTOS have dual Gigabit NIC's and I only have NIC #1 cabled and enabled to a switch for LAN connectivity. I was wondering if you guys recommend enabling the 2nd NIC as a fail over NIC in case NIC #1 dies. Is this possible? Anyone have any thoughts and or suggestions?

Only one NIC on the same subnet can have the same IP address. Given that, you would either need to set up round robin in your DNS with 2 A records pointing to the same domain name, but to different IP addresses.

This would also mean that all your inbound services need to listen on but ip addresses as well.

The major drawback of this system is that when one of the NIC goes down, users are still having a 50% chance of trying to reach the NIC that is down.

Another solution is to add another hop between the internet and both NIC. That other device must do some 'alive' tests on both NIC and only forward the request to a NIC that is up.

This functionality can be obtained by using a rather expensive hardware loadbalancer.

If you are running RH AS you can use bonding. This will give the same IP to both nic's. You may want to do a 'man bonding' to check if you have this on your machine.

Thanks all. I think I will just deal with one NIC for the time being...