Two connections at one time?

[CalcProgrammer1]

I have 5 Ethernet cards in my PC (what do you do when you have a bunch of empty PCI slots and a bunch of old Ethernet boards...).

That said, my university connection gives you a different EXTERNAL (Internet) IP for each MAC address you register, so I figured I can use 2 Ethernet boards and get 2 IP's so I can trick those annoying sites that have IP filters and such (where you can only download X amount per hour per IP). I'd also like to have my FTP transfer from my home desktop to here be on one connection while having the other one (full bandwidth, I think they allot bandwidth per computer [aka registered MAC]) do Internet browsing and Internet downloading.

Is there any way to set one program to use one connection and another program to use another connection?

 

[mikesgroovin]

Well, you would think right? Why not?!?!?

If it did, it would have to start at the top layer (application layer... but, really dependent upon what you are dealing with) It would have to be a configurable for the application to understand that it only needs to communicate with ETH0 or ETH1, etc. If the application triggers an IP address specifically, then you can just give it the proper IP... but, in all honesty... most applications with deliver based on the first available connection if a choice is given.

So, in short, no... unless the application allows you to plug in a primary card, mac address or IP that it operates under.

You could write a script for this kind of thing, but if you did that then you would still only be operating 1 app at a time if the script were to say.... rip the DG addrss from ETH0 or ETH1 at the time it was run.

Maybe someone else has more insight to this.

 

[office politics]

could try creating multiple virtual machines on one physical box. i don't know how the MAC addresses are handled though.

vmware esxi is free.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

I was thinking, would there be any way to do a local proxy with one card? That way whatever you want using the second card you'd just tell it to proxy through 127.0.0.1. Probably not, don't know why they wouldn't make the OS handle multiple connections better. Wonder if it can be done in Linux.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Could always attempt network load ballancing...

 

[CntdwnToExtn]

could try creating multiple virtual machines on one physical box. i don't know how the MAC addresses are handled though.

vmware esxi is free.

VMWare Server does this as well.
ESXi is a hypervisor which runs on the actual hardware. Offers no GUI at all.
The screen just sits there...black and yellow.
It requires basically VMWare Infrastructure to work, which is $$$.
You can get by with their 'hidden' tech support command line which is nice, but to much time to waste learning it properly.
Then you would need another computer anyway to access the VM's.

If you have the RAM though, virtualization w/ a bunch of Linux distro's installed on each could work with VMWare Server 1.0.7 (I hate 2.0 ...)
Each VM created has it's own generated MAC address. So possibly wouldn't even need 5 NIC's since they give you an IP for each MAC?

Download it and see what happens.