[Asterisk-Users] Trouble with 2 NIC cards

[Stephen R. Besch]

I don't know if this helps, but I run 2 Nics; one for access to the 
192.168 (private) domain, the other for the public domain.  Under RH the 
second card was autodetected, installed and became available in the net 
setup, where I assigned IP addresses to the cards and off I went.  No 
troubles at all.  I suspect that your problems stem from one of 2 
sources.  Either there is an interrupt conflict, which incidentally, is 
not a trivial issue to resolve any more, since virtually all PCI 
computers use shared interrupts on the PCI bus, regardless of how many 
free hardware interrupts there are.  It is not uncommon to have only one 
slot that you can configure for an unshared interrupt, and then you 
frequently have to make sure that some of the MB resources are 
disabled.  Since the Digium card needs an unshared interrupt slot, you 
had better make sure that the NICs will run with shared interrupts.  The 
second item is the software setup.  The  only suggestion I can make here 
is to read, read, then read some more.  There is a sometimes 
overwhelming, but tractable body of information out there regarding 
setting up hardware under linux.

But first, ask yourself another question.  Do you really need 2 NICs.  
Linux has the very nice feature of letting you assign multiple IP's to a 
single NIC.  You can listen on a private IP subnet for the NAT part and 
also have an IP on the public IP address space.  I know this works 
because I did it myself before I installed the second NIC, which I did 
for performance reasons (One is dedicated to the phone audio/SIP 
streams, at the present time 20 phones, and the other routes calls to a 
VOIP provider over the internet.

Stephen R. Besch

Asterisk wrote:

>The problem should be easy enough to solve for someone who knows the
>internal guts. As a matter of fact, this is very important to resolve.
>Asterisk behind firewall is trouble and that is known already. So I
>decided to use the same linux box as firewall, meaning I need atleast
>two NICs. I wonder how others are solving this issue. I refuse to
>believe that no one faced similar problems cause there is no other way
>for a beginner to plant an Asterisk box but have two NICs or go through
>the NAT troubles. Moreover, there are news posts all over about SIP
>phones meaning others are connecting more than one NICs. Wonder why they
>don't have similar issue. I am sure that there are more out there who
>are facing similar problems so people who have solved this, please speak
>up and help us all.
>
>Thanks in advance.
>Ricky
>
> 
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com
>[mailto:asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Chee Foong
>Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2003 6:00 PM
>To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
>Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Trouble with 2 NIC cards
>
>Hello,
>I have the quite similiar problem like yours except that both of my NIC
>have
>fix public ip from different ISP provider.
>Unfortunately we are unable to make it work. This is due to some routing
>issues of the Asterisk box. My collegue was trying hard to seting up the
>routing tables, but did no succeed.
>
>We finally has given up trying. The solution we have make is to have 2
>different asterisk iax server and make these server peer to each other,
>but
>not yet try though.
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <thisemailaddressisbogus at risehigh.com>
>To: <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
>Sent: Friday, October 24, 2003 7:39 AM
>Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Trouble with 2 NIC cards
>
>
>  
>
>>Greetings everyone.
>>
>>Did anyone try using 2 NIC cards on the machine? For some reason,
>>    
>>
>asterisk
>  
>
>>can not identify which IP should be used. In the config files
>>    
>>
>(IAX.conf,
>  
>
>>sip.conf etc), there is a way to bind the IP address but if the
>>    
>>
>machine is
>  
>
>>hooked to a DHCP server (such as cable modem), then fix IP doesn't
>>    
>>
>work.
>It
>  
>
>>should be simple to bind it to a perticular ethernet card (eth0 or
>>    
>>
>eth1)
>  
>
>>instead of an IP address. Anyone tried multiple NICs with asterisk?
>>Please write your commentes.
>>
>>Thanks.
>>Ricky
>>
>>
>>
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>>Asterisk-Users at lists.digium.com
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>>
>>    
>>
>
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>
>  
>