Bi-Pass NIC Card
- From: "Wayne Berry" <wayne@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'[ISAserver.org Discussion List]'" <isalist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:16:48 -0800
ISAList:
For another project I am working on we have on hand some Bi-Pass NIC Cards.
Basically, they are a single NIC card with two network ports on the back,
however unlike other two port NICs if there is a power failure then they
have a mechanical switch that bridges the two NICs together allowing all
network traffic to pass across them bi-passing the box (like a single
wire). They also have a watch dog that can be enabled so you can bridge
them on software failure, i.e. the software tells the card to stay
non-bi-pass every 3 seconds or it automatically bi-passes, if the software
process goes down then the NIC bi-pass.
The interesting idea here is that if you used this in an ISA box you could
have your two NICs, and some sort of failure redundancy. The biggest
drawback is that if the power fails then you have no more firewall <- Big
Ouch. However, if you were only running the ISA server as a reverse or
forward proxy cache then they might be helpful. But, in proxy mode you are
probably running a one NIC scenario anyways. I don't know if this is such a
good idea - but someone else might have a way to use these type of cards.
Thoughts, Comments, Concerns.
-Wayne
The ISAPI Dev Lurking on the ISA Admin List
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