# [RESOLVED] What is the purpose of multiple NIC ports?



## fred974 (Jul 6, 2014)

Hello everyone..

I just bought a new server for our production environment (Dell PowerEdge r610)..
This is my first real server (I always used old desktop box before).

My question is why servers comes with 4 Ethernet ports? What do you guys use them for?
How do you set Pf firewall with four ports?

The server will have 3 jails (web, DB, Mail) Can them be se in my advantages?

Thank you all in advance

Fred


----------



## obsigna (Jul 6, 2014)

*Re: What is the purpose of multiple NIC ports?*



			
				fred974 said:
			
		

> My question is why servers comes with 4 Ethernet ports? What do you guys use them for?



You could use one port for WAN and utilize bridge(4) or lagg(4) with the other three.

See:
30.6. Bridging
30.7. Link Aggregation and Failover


----------



## kpa (Jul 6, 2014)

*Re: What is the purpose of multiple NIC ports?*

Another use could be a firewall/router/proxy with some more advanced filtering that needs some serious processing power and can not be handled with the usual low end hardware that you find in simple router/firewalls.


----------



## Oko (Jul 6, 2014)

*Re: What is the purpose of multiple NIC ports?*

You might use the first interface for IPMI management, the second for one subnet, and third for another subnet. When I use server as a KVM host I like to use a separate physical interface for each KVM guest You can do the same in FreeBSD jails. You might want to learn also about aggregation.  If you are using server for firewall/router or similar the answer should be obvious why you would as man NIC as possible.


----------



## fred974 (Jul 7, 2014)

*Re: What is the purpose of multiple NIC ports?*

Thank you all for the relies..
I now have some reading to do


----------

