On Jan 3, 2014, at 1:30 PM, "Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [V]" <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Networking tends to use connection-based routing. You use the best way to >> get to a target address, not all possible ways. >> In fact, the Mac determines "best" way by port order in the Networks panel, >> not by speed -- if you have Airport higher than Ethernet, it will connect >> everything over Airport and leave ethernet totally idle. > Thanks for the response. I always figured that MacOSX would choose the > fastest of multiple network options. I guess it's good that one can re-order > the options if there is some reason to prefer a particular slower choice. More precisely, Mac OS uses a well-defined mixture of list order and IP address range. One simple example where this becomes very important is the VPN "device." You VPN into a remote server and are given an address. If you use your Mac from public hotspots and are looking to encrypt all your public traffic, you put VPN at the top of the device list, and all your general internet requests (any address NOT on a LAN to which one of your other ports is directly connected) will go over the VPN tunnel. If instead you just want requests to your home or work LAN machines to use the VPN, you put VPN below your other devices, and you will access the general internet through Ethernet or Airport. On Jan 3, 2014, at 2:00 PM, Karl Kuehn <[email protected]> wrote: > But to answer an un-asked question: the main reason behind the dual > ports on MacPros is not to do port aggregation, but rather to allow > connections on two separate networks. Mostly this is so that you can have > both an ethernet connection, as well as a Storage Area Network (SAN) > connection. Here we use additional ethernet ports to allow direct communication to multiple wireless networking devices on the bench (configuration, testing, debugging, net-booting) so that we can talk to both ends of the lashup from the same test machine (sort of like the inverse of a KVM switch). Meanwhile, we use the Airport connection to connect normally to the greater internet to continue to access the manuals, discussion fora, and so on. Since we use portables and Minis instead of Mac Pro$, we add ethernet ports on demand with these inexpensive little gems. -- Macs R We -- Personal Macintosh Service and Support in the Wickenburg and far Northwest Valley Areas. http://macsrwe.com
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