# Network configuration



## Gherardo (Dec 7, 2020)

Hi everyone,

I have a Freebsd machine that I use as a file server for backups.
Everything is working great and it's been ok for the last few years.

The problem is that my backups are getting bigger (especially VMs) and the network Gigabit appears to be the bottleneck.
I was thinking on trying a 10G network, but the problem is that WOL doesn't work on 10G NICs and I need it, since I use it to wake the freebsd machine.

So I was thinking to use 2 NIC on the freebsd machine: the 'old' Gigabit network card just for the WOL, and the new 10G for the traffic itself.
The proble now is that I would certainly create a network loop, so I would need to configure the routing.

While I was thinking about an implementatio I though that if I could just disable at boot the 'old' NIC, I wouldn't have any problem, since it basically just
needs to be used to wake the computer.

And here's the problem: how do I turn off a network card at boot?
I tried in  rc.conf  `ifconfig_<interface>="NOAUTO"` or just `service ifconfig <interface> down` but it's not completely disabled.
Is there a way to disable the NIC once and for all?

Thanks in advance for any inputs.


Gherardo


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## SirDice (Dec 7, 2020)

Gherardo said:


> So I was thinking to use 2 NIC on the freebsd machine: the 'old' Gigabit network card just for the WOL, and the new 10G for the traffic itself.
> The proble now is that I would certainly create a network loop, so I would need to configure the routing.


Don't give the gigabit network card an IP address, you may need to set it to 'up' though. No loops. WoL works on broadcasts and has the interface's MAC address. 









						Wake-on-LAN - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				






Gherardo said:


> And here's the problem: how do I turn off a network card at boot?


Interfaces are 'down' by default. Just don't configure it then it'll stay 'down'.


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