What can I do with Dual Gigabit Ethernet?

Hi Brian,

Welcome to Apple Discussions

The only thing I can think of is for people who need to connect to two different networks at once. An example would be a for a administrator at a school or business. They could connect to the private administrative network as well as connect to the student or employee.

Jon

Mac Mini 1.42Ghz, iPod (All) , Airport (Graphite & Express), G4 1.33Ghz iBook , G4 iMac 1Ghz, G3 500Mhz, iBook iMac 233Mhz, eMate, Power Mac 5400 LC, PowerBook 540c, Macintosh 128K, Apple //e, Apple //, and some more... Mac OS X (10.4.5) Moto Razr, iLife '06, SmartDisk 160Gb, Apple BT Mouse, Sight..

The main reason for having 2 network interfaces on a computer is in order for it to be used as a server of some kind such as a router, firewall, netboot server, dhcp server etc.

For normal use you would just use 1 of the network interfaces, if your using a gigabit network then use the faster network interface.

Hi Brian,

I have this new Quad with dual ethernet sooooo what can I do with it?.Do I connect both lines to my Gigabit switch for faster file transfer or what? I'm not a newby to this I just can't seem to find the answers anywhere

Congrats for your new G5 and its dual Gbit Ethernet interfaces 🙂

You can do some pretty sppedy+cool stuff, it all depends on your needs. What kind of work do you do? What kind of network(s) do you run? Are you familiar with unix?

Connecting both lines to your Gbit switch is one of them...


Macs running 9.x, Macs running 10.4.x and SGI workstations running Irix 6.5.x

Another reason to have 2 NIC's is to connect a printer or another server (without using a hub) with a cross-over cable. The reasons are endless. . .
If you build it, they will use it.

Very little if you're thinking faster file transfers. Since Macs come standard with PATA/SATA drives, they're not capable of "flooding" a single gigabit link. You would need U320 SCSI or Fibre + SCSI drives in a RAID configuration in order to saturate such a high speed link.

A few things you can use it for, though:

Fail-over
Load balancing