Dedicated NICs for 2x HDHomerun -- How?

[mitchedo]

Hi,

I threw my server together yesterday, and it seems to work pretty well. I took the advice here and purchased 3 Intel NICs. I read the (very scant) documentation for the HDHomeruns, and it seems like they'd autoassign an IP address. So I configured the two NICs with the IP address range they suggested (169.something.x.x). Well, it wouldn't work. When I ran the HDHomerun setup, it instantly came back with "0 HDHomeruns found".

So I read around a bit, and found some were using a DHCP server to assign IP addresses to their HDHomerun dedicated NICs. I found a nice one, that's just a DHCP server, but it looked like a pain to configure.

So, I went to Windows 7 Control Panel and highlighted all three Intel NICs and bridged them.

All seems to work swell now, but did I just invalidate any advantage I gained with the dedicated NICs in the first place?

Thanks,

Doug

whole home server:

Windows 7 Professional x64, SageTV 7
2x HDHomeruns on dedicated gigabit Intel NICs, 3rd Intel NIC out to giga switch
Athlon II x4 635 (2.9GHz), AMD 785G motherboard, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, 6 hard drives
2x 500 GB RAID 1 OS (225 GB data partition)
2x 1TB RAID 1 Sage recordings
2x 1 TB RAID 1 Sage recordings

2 ea HD300 on order, couple of clients and Placeshifter planned

[Tiki]

I think bridging is what you want to do. Your PC then acts like a router connecting multiple subnets together. Traffic within one subnet doesn't travel across the other subnets, but traffic that needs to cross subnets still can.

I am curious why you got 3 NICs though. One good NIC should be able to handle traffic for several HD capture devices and extenders as well as other normal network traffic.

If you have a lot of extenders (and/or ethernet-connected encoders) or do a lot of large PC to PC file transfers on your GBE (gigabit Ethernet) network, I could see you wanting to isolate your Sage video stuff on a separate subnet. In that case I would have 1 dedicated NIC to be shared by all of my extenders. Use the second NIC to connect to your home network. I would just use the built-in NIC for the home network connection unless you actually had performance issues.

Having a separate NIC for each extender is just way overkill. A single GB NIC should easily be able to handle 20 extenders all streaming HD video at the same time (in theory it could handle 50). Of course your hard disks probably couldn't keep up without a decent RAID array.

[sic0048]

Personally I would KISS. You will have no problem simply hooking up the HDHRs to your existing gigabit network. They don't even have gigabit capabilites because they don't output that much data to need them.

[GKusnick]

I agree with the others that you're making your life a lot more complicated trying to solve a problem that hasn't happened and probably won't. Just set everything up on a single NIC and see how that works. Chances are it will be fine and you won't have to mess with multiple NICs.

[Fuzzy]

Well, seeing as you've already bought the NICs, there's nothing wrong with keeping them running in bridged mode. That is the way I'd have them set up as well. You'll get the advantage of the network segregation, but still allow cross communication between nets if necessary. One advantage of a NIC for each HDHR would be not needing a switch on those NICs, just hook up the HDHR directly to the NIC.

[Beefcake550]

I believe the advice was taken from me to get multiple NICs. Personally, I would have gone with 2 (as I did). 3 is only "better".

The way the HDHR software works is to try and "ping" and HDHRs out there on any network card with a 169.* address. If there are cards with this address range, it turns on a DHCP server in the software. Perhaps the software is not able to handle multiple HDHRs or you configured the IPs wrong. I would have tried making one 169.254.1.1 and the other 169.254.1.2 with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0.

Ok, 'nuf on that.

The bridging worked because it probably assigned the same IP address from your router's DHCP server to all "3" NICs. Now, the HDHR software can find them and doesn't turn on it's DHCP server, since it's likely that they all got IPs from your router's DHCP server as well. So now, your computer is doing the bridging and figuring out the routes between your HDHRs and SageTV, your computer. All traffic from each HDHR will likely now only go from the HDHR to the computer. You can check this easily. Open up task manager and go to the networking tab. Startup SageTV and don't tune a channel. All network traffic should be 0 (assuming you are doing nothing else). Now, tune in a liveTV channel using a HDHR as a tuner and watch the network traffic. It should ONLY become nonzero for the NIC attached to that HDHR.

Report back if that is not the case. (:

Good luck on this setup... it should be awesome. If you need help getting the most out of those hard drives, let me know. You may want to consider not using RAID 1 but just having the 4 seperate drives to serve up more I/O to each extender.

PM me if you want to chat about it. I have some real world experience with 3 tuners (1 HDHR and 1 HDPVR), 3 HD200s and 1 SageTV client.

[jasonl]

Not recommended to have 2 interfaces on the same IP subnet in any OS, and that goes double for Windows. Bridging the 3 interfaces together basically presents a single interface to the OS, and creates a virtual switch with ports for each of the network cards, allowing each HDHomeRun to get an IP from the router. This basically removes any advantage of having separate interfaces in the first place. If you really want to keep them separate, leave NIC 1 connected to the rest of your network, connect NIC 2 to a switch that is also connected to both HDHomeRun devices, and enable Internet Connection Sharing of NIC 1 to NIC 2. Remove NIC 3. The PC will assign IPs to each HDHomeRun, and you'll have full connection speed to the rest of your network.

[DigitalMan]

A year ago when I bought a new server and moved sage into a VM running under ESXi I set up the Sage VM with 3 virtual nics (because I could!). 1 on a segment dedicated to the HDHR's on their own gigabit port and switch, another on a segment connected to another gigabit port/switch so I could transfer/edit/etc without affecting the others, and the third, where the Sage clients were, also connected to its own external gigabit port.

Well, despite reasonable efforts, none of them ever broke a sweat. A couple of months ago I rearranged the clients/tuners/SageVM back onto one NIC and got rid of the other two NICs and they still don't break a sweat.

Unless you have more than 4 HDHR's and more than 8 clients (even this will leave you reasonable margin), having multiple segments is nothing more than an exercise.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by jasonl

Not recommended to have 2 interfaces on the same IP subnet in any OS, and that goes double for Windows. Bridging the 3 interfaces together basically presents a single interface to the OS, and creates a virtual switch with ports for each of the network cards, allowing each HDHomeRun to get an IP from the router. This basically removes any advantage of having separate interfaces in the first place. If you really want to keep them separate, leave NIC 1 connected to the rest of your network, connect NIC 2 to a switch that is also connected to both HDHomeRun devices, and enable Internet Connection Sharing of NIC 1 to NIC 2. Remove NIC 3. The PC will assign IPs to each HDHomeRun, and you'll have full connection speed to the rest of your network.

What makes you say bridging removes any advantage of having the seperate nics? Bridging, as you said, creates a virtual switch, NOT a virtual hub. Therefore, traffic is only routed where it needs to go. You gain the important advantage of seperate NIC's - full bandwidth available between the HDHomeRun and the Server, regardless of traffic between the server and other parts of the network - Without any of the disadvantages of lacking DHCP and such on the isolated networks. In this situation, there is no viable reason NOT to bridge the connections.

[jasonl]

You lose the advantage of separate NICs, because when bridging is enabled, Windows only sees the single bridge interface, and not the separate cards. In effect, it is the same as having a single NIC in the PC and connecting it to a switch with the HDHomeRun and the rest of the network also connected. A high load between the PC and the outside network can interfere with the performance of the HDHomeRun, especially with the added overhead of the bridge. In all honesty, I wouldn't even consider running a separate network if the primary was gigabit, and my test network regularly has 8 or more streams going at a time and doesn't break a sweat.

Jason
Silicondust

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by jasonl

Jason
Silicondust

I used to be in the separate NIC camp, but I think i'll take this guys word for it