Second Mac Pro Gigabit Ethernet port

[cruzrojas]

I don't have a mac pro, but maybe some day . But I was just wondering, the mac pro comes with 2 gigabit ethernet ports, what is the purpose or application of the second one. I was thinking that maybe if you connect the two at the same time to your network it will go faster, but this is not necessary since maybe your are using the maximum bandwidth your provider has to offer with only one port. (I don't know if that is clear)

Anyway, what does the common mac pro user do with the extra port? And do you know or can think of a good use you can give to it?

Best Regards
Jesus Cruz

 

[apple_iBoy]

I have my ethernet router plugged into one port and my Apple TV in the other.

 

[jsw]

The most frequent professional use for them is to allow the Mac Pro to connect to two different networks - for example, one development/lab/experimental network, one internet access one.

Obviously, you can use them any way you want.

 

[apfhex]

I use the second port to connect (and share internet with) other computers, mostly my ol' PowerBook, which also has Gigabit ethernet.... faaast transfers wee~!

 

[SC68Cal]

Use as a server in a small client environment.

One ethernet plugs into your modem or dsl line, the other one shares the connection between other clients.

Or, I believe you can use both ethernet cables together to create more bandwidth for rendering and Xsan tasks.

 

[miniConvert]

Yes, you can aggregate the links. Unfortunately Open Directory doesn't seem to like that much, so I'm just using the one port, but in Server terms having a port for external traffic and a port for internal traffic is quite important - if that's the role you want a Mac Pro to perform.

 

[cruzrojas]

Well that makes sense, I was just curios. Thanks for your replays.
Best Regards
Jesus Cruz

 

[erickkoch]

This was a good question. I've had my Mac Pro for about two weeks and only yesterday discovered it had two the two ports. Now I know why.

 

[scottlinux]

There are also NAS (network attached storage) devices/servers and such that work as network mounted hard drives that connect via a gigabit network card. So one network card for your internet, one for the internal NAS. The speeds are pretty good with this sort of thing.

Also some applications can use computers networked together as a cluster via a second gigabit jack (Ex. Logic Pro).

And it is handy to have two network cards if you are using the machine as a server or router to share or manage a network connection for other computers.

 

[tomaskad]

How to configure the second port

There are also NAS (network attached storage) devices/servers and such that work as network mounted hard drives that connect via a gigabit network card. So one network card for your internet, one for the internal NAS. The speeds are pretty good with this sort of thing....

Hi,

I would like ask, how to congigure te second port. I try to connect NAS directly to the second port, the network status of the second port is OK, but the storage is not accesible. May me the IP address of the second port the same as the first, may be the second port configured on the seme network ??? Please help.

Tomas

 

[SDAVE]

Most server based motherboards (What the Mac Pro has) always have 2 ethernet ports...both can be connected to a switch and if one goes bad there is always the second one for backup...or you can use it any other way you want as stated in this thread.

 

[sansond]

How about running a SBS server on it. We have a small IT shop that does everything form web development to server and network support. My Mac Pro runs Windows SBS 2003 in Fusion as a virtual machine. We have 5 windows client pc's connected to it using Exchange. The second nic is used for the server along with a separate hard drive and 2 cores of the available 8. Performance is great for something small like this. It runs as a server while I run my day to day stuff off of it (Word, Excel, Entourage and web development). We have had it running for 4 months without a hiccup. The Mac Pro is without a doubt the most versatile box you can buy.

Mac Pro 8 Core
12GB Ram
3 TB Hard Drive
Gigabit network

 

[UltraNEO*]

I don't have a mac pro, but maybe some day . But I was just wondering, the mac pro comes with 2 gigabit ethernet ports, what is the purpose or application of the second one. I was thinking that maybe if you connect the two at the same time to your network it will go faster, but this is not necessary since maybe your are using the maximum bandwidth your provider has to offer with only one port. (I don't know if that is clear)

Anyway, what does the common mac pro user do with the extra port? And do you know or can think of a good use you can give to it?

Best Regards
Jesus Cruz

Wait...
Modern PC boards also have twin Ethernet...
what do those users do with theirs? Ain't it the same?

 

[ragu]

Quick question for you to answer I can eth1 for my cable modem and eth2 to connect my says VPN router and wifi which should share my connection through the Mac right

 

[jasonvp]

Anyway, what does the common mac pro user do with the extra port? And do you know or can think of a good use you can give to it?

I have a managed Gigabit Ethernet switch (from Cisco) in my office. That switch supports 802.3ad Ethernet bundling. In other words: turning n Ethernet ports into 1. The two ports on the switch that connect to my Mac Pro are configured as a bundle (2x1GigE). The ports on the Mac Pro are also configured as a bundle (Bonded interface, in BSD-speak).

$ ifconfig bond0
bond0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
	options=b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_HWTAGGING>
	ether 3c:07:54:7c:6e:1a
	inet6 fe80::3e07:54ff:fe7c:6e1a%bond0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x8
	inet 169.254.215.58 netmask 0xffff0000 broadcast 169.254.255.255
	nd6 options=1<PERFORMNUD>
	media: autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
	status: active
	bond interfaces: en1 en0

You can see that it notes en0 and en1 are both part of it. It doesn't have a usable IP address because I've also VLAN'd it, but that's not something that's required. I just did it because I wanted access to 2 VLANs at any given time, and the aforementioned managed switch supports that, as well.

vlan0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
	options=3<RXCSUM,TXCSUM>
	ether 3c:07:54:7c:6e:1a
	inet6 fe80::3e07:54ff:fe7c:6e1a%vlan0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0xa
	inet6 [clip]
	inet6 [clip]
	inet [clip]
	nd6 options=1<PERFORMNUD>
	vlan: 690 parent interface: bond0
	media: autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
	status: active
vlan1: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
	options=3<RXCSUM,TXCSUM>
	ether 3c:07:54:7c:6e:1a
	inet6 fe80::3e07:54ff:fe7c:6e1a%vlan1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0xb
	inet [clip]
	inet6 [clip]
	inet6 [clip]
	nd6 options=1<PERFORMNUD>
	vlan: 770 parent interface: bond0
	media: autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
	status: active

Creating this is pretty easy from the Mac side. In the Network System Prefs panel, click on the little gear box at the bottom of the list of interfaces, and Manage Virtual Interfaces. The rest of it it pretty self explanatory. The included screen shots are from my laptop at work and don't have the Bond or VLAN interfaces. But you'll get the idea...

 

[monkeybagel]

I agree with what everyone else said. Works wonderful for VLANing, accessing two subnets, NIC teaming... Has many uses and is a feature I use very often.

 

[stevedusa]

I just use one for the OS X and the other one for Bootcamp / VM.

 

[hugodrax]

You might have a VSS cluster and you want to do teaming so you can connect the computer via a port channel configuration to a switch cluster for performance and redundancy

 

[haravikk]

I use my second port to allow OS X and Windows (under Bootcamp and virtualisation) to have their own individual IP addresses on my network. It doesn't serve any particular purpose, but on a machine I paid £4000 for when it was new, I want to use both ports dammit!

 

[westrock2000]

I will add that the motherboard is essentially a "server" class motherboard, and every server motherboard I have worked with in the last 10 years has had dual NIC's. So its just a common feature, in my opinion.

 

[hfg]

I recall my Synology NAS mentioned using dual ethernet ports to aggregate the links for improved performance.

Has anyone actually done this with a Mac Pro?

Does it require a special router to do this, or simply one with 2 available ports?


Thanks,
-howard

 

[jasonvp]

Has anyone actually done this with a Mac Pro?

Does it require a special router to do this, or simply one with 2 available ports?

Look at my post #16 in this thread. Yes. It requires a Gigabit Ethernet switch that supports 802.3ad bundling. Cisco calls it "EtherChannel". Other vendors call it "Bonding" or something else. But it ultimately means: bundling n Ethernet ports into a single interface.

Your run-of-the-mill home Ethernet switches won't have the brains for this. It needs to be a managed switch; in other words, one you can log into and change port settings. Most cheap switches don't have that functionality. Neither do most cheap home routers.

 

[AidenShaw]

Yes. It requires a Gigabit Ethernet switch that supports 802.3ad bundling. Cisco calls it "EtherChannel". Other vendors call it "Bonding" or something else.

"Teaming" is another common term for it.

... I just sent a P.O. to Cisco for a $57K Nexus switch. It will team 10 GbE ports - T-Bolt 2 seems so slow....

 

[hfg]

"Teaming" is another common term for it.

... I just sent a P.O. to Cisco for a $57K Nexus switch. It will team 10 GbE ports - T-Bolt 2 seems so slow....

Thanks to both of you for the info ... I do have a managed router, but it is a low cost D-Link and doesn't appear to support this. I will have to look for an "affordable" unit to see if it is worthwhile to try for a bit of extra backup speed.

($57K is a bit out of my range )

-howard

 

[AidenShaw]

($57K is a bit out of my range

$57K is a very small order to Cisco - a few years ago I ordered a $335K switch from them.

That was for about 1000 GbE ports. The $57K switch is for 32 SFP+ ports of 10 GbE.

Yes, $2K per port is a good deal for just the switch. Figure another $1K per port per host.