Multiple NIC cards on same network - requires HP-APA???

[Mark Coleman_1]

I'm trying to configure 2 Gigabit igelan interfaces with 2 different IP's in a single RP4440. The 2 different IP's are on the same network, ie 192.168.1. Every time I've tried this the server networking fails on boot and the only way I can get the machine up and running is to remove the netconf entries for the second NIC card. I was reading some threads on the forum and one described the need for the HP-APA software to do this. That thread was pretty old so I was wondering if this is still the case with HPUX 11.11?
The problem I am trying to solve is to have 2 IP addresses for this server and allow DNS to do "round robin" load balancing.

[rick jones · Accepted solution]

If you simply configure two physical (from the standpoint of the transport) interfaces into the same IP subnet, you are implicitly stating that both have equal connectivity to the rest of the "network."

While traffic can be received on both interfcaes, it will only go out _one_ of the interfaces unless you either do some creative static route stuff and/or enable ip_strong_es_model. So, if both interfaces do not have equal connectivity to the rest of the cloud you can have trouble reaching things like DNS servers, NFS servers etc etc and that can do bad things to boot time...

While it is not "required" it would be "cleaner" to purchase and install APA as that will give you both load balancing and link HA.

[Mark Coleman_1]

Thanks Rick! Every time I tried to get this working neither interface would come up. I agree that the APA software would be a better approach. Thanks for the info.

Mark