can i double connection speed?
 

is it possible for me to connect 2 lan cards to 2 diff. lan connections on 1 computer to double maximum(at least increase) possible speed assuming rest of the hardware isnt a bottleneck?

I have always wanted to try that too. One connected to a Cable Internet say, and the other to Dsl. Would be cool if it worked! Hope someone can give you and answer, I have been to lazy to research this, and still am :P lol. Probably b/c I couldnt afford the $80 for both connections.

Later

Yes it is possible. I used to work at an ISP and I did a personal project to do this. (Actually I bound a DSL connection and a cable connection together)

Its not easy because you have to manage the following

request is pended for lets say a file, the computer selects the connection that would get the file faster and sends the request.. Now because the request gets sent over the duration, the requests would end up going out through both sources, and the packet would have to be spoofed to come back the right way..

High end routers do this for you, and have the ability to manage two or more ATM ports.. USR had an old product called shotgun that you could use with 56 modems to do it as well

I know this is done on Unix systems, there is actually a software program you can buy that manages it for you. I think it is called Auto-Port Aggregation software or something like that.
No help, but it is possible w/ Unix.

WOW that would be awesome to do.........

I Know that tere are routers that up can plug in at least 2 internet connections and it divides the traffic to get the maximum speed from teh multiple connects without getting too much overlapping returns.

I've tried it on a dual port wan router with a T1 and a DSL line. web surfing/downloading was good, but sometimes during a telnet or ssh session the router would send traffic out on both lines. Since the server saw a different IPs and the higher-level stuff on my sys didn't know what was going on, my sessions were killed.

Now, I set the load balancing to 100/0, that way the 2nd connection is used when the primary is down...redundancy.

Thats the best you can do for it. The other option is to set different ports to different connections, so when there is an http request it goes through one port, and if there is a "file share" request it goes through the other one..

Isn't there a value in the Hardware profile where you can adjust the amount of data the computer can accept on the network card or something? I've seen somebody doing the same when it comes to adjusting the speed of his internet but I wasn't too sure if that's what he was actually doing...

I think you're taliking about packet size. On fast connections you can increase speed (slightly) by increasing the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) size. Larger MTU = Less packet Fragmentation = more efficient data transfer/speed.

I think this was mainly an issue on Win98/Me?. The MTU values on NT/2000/XP are already optimized for LAN/Broadband. In Linux, you can adjust the packet size for services (NFS/SAMBA...) to increase performance.

I actually thought of that. After a call to the manufacturer (nexland), my suspicions were confirmed. On this particular router, you can only bind ports on incoming traffic, not outbound traffic.

I know BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) was written to do this, but it's usually used on routers. And those routers have to be pretty powerful, since they have to keep large amounts of core routing files for the other BGP routers they talk to.

If you are just one person that will be trying to use the benefits of this, it is almost pointless unless you are doing a massive amount of large file downloads. The benefits of using two broadband connections to increase your up/down throughput would only be seen with a lot of users that are trying to get data at the same time. An ISP would find the benefits of this as they are providing an internet connection for a large number of customers. A single home user would more than likely not see any benefit to this unless they are doing a lot of large file transfers all the time.