Twin Gigabit Ethernet Port Laptop

dejongj

dejongj

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I require a laptop with twin Ethernet ports. Going up to a just gigabit is fine. And preferably wifi as well.

This is a for a Linux installation.

I've had a Asix based USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet dongle laying around which didn't play well through a virtual machine.

Has anyone got any suggestions? I prefer high resolution screen in a small physical screen size as I need to travel with it as well.

Budget / Money is not an issue at all. But hey I do value money, but at this stage anything goes.
 
I've never seen a laptop with dual ethernet ports. I guess they must exist, but even the massively overspecced Dell Precision (i7, 16GB RAM etc.) that my mother has only has a single ethernet port.

Rather than USB, have you considered a PCMCIA / PC Card (or whatever the current version is called) network adapter?

You mention a virtual machine - in general ESXi plays a lot better than Hyper-V with USB passthrough either with the device plugged into the client or the host, although since you're talking about a laptop I'm guessing you want it in the client.
 
Thanks for the ideas. I had the prototype running on my MBA with VMWare fusion.

Ideally I would run within a virtual machine as it makes snapshots and rollback a doddle.

I will look into well supported pcmcia/Pccard:cardbus or whatever. It is actually hard finding a laptop with one of those.

I will have a go with an old laptop tonight to see if the dongle works without a virtualisation layer in between.

I'm sure I've seen old workstation laptops that had dual cards. But yes Google doesn't show anything.
 
arad85 said:
Why?
Click to expand...
One connected to a network tap ;) and the other to actual network but at a different point.

I could get something like a Fluke Optiview or TimeMachine but was hoping to save about £80,000 as I don't require all functionality.

Oh and laptop as it will have to go around about 77 countries.
 
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Why do you need a separate network adapter for the virtual machine? Do you want to connect the guest OS to a physically different network? This is the only scenario that I can think of in which you would need one. I think you could probably use a managed/smart switch (~£60) and vlan tagging to achieve the same thing
 
One needs to go in a network tap, it won't have an IP address. In some scenarios that will be on the "dirty" side of the Internet.

I require a second connection to the internet. As many will be abroad it needs to be portable and easy to plug in.
 
I have an old DELL Precision M90 Core2Duo 17" laptop which works with a Dell D-Series docking station, the docking station can accommodate a PCI card. At the moment I am using it with a PCI SCSI adapter for a film scanner but it should accommodate a network adapter instead. I don't know if later laptop docks (or other vendors) have similar facilities.
 
I've run desktops with dual network cards for a couple of specific applications, but never a laptop, You can get USB network adapters from a few places including Amazon
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&...=aps&hvadid=3170728070&ref=pd_sl_25zrlyv4wn_b

Now I'm not sure if the laptop will recognise these as separate network cards to the normal built in one. It's a long time ago but with the desktops we gave each network a unique name and used fixed IPs 'IIRC.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions guys/girls.

A USB one works very well on my MBA, I've got a Asix 88179 chipset 1Gigabit via USB and it is perfect. I started to ask the question on here because that one didn't work in a virtual machine. I've now found my old Dell Inspiron 9100 on which I'll make a full local Linux install and see if that works via a USB dongle.

Unfortunately I wouldn't like to carry a docking station as well, so if I can get away with that, than that would be great.
 
It might be easier to do this though a managed router, use wireless for one connection (static IP) & plug in the Ethernet with static IP when you need to use that...
Then just carry both with you.
 
Diving Pete said:
It might be easier to do this though a managed router, use wireless for one connection (static IP) & plug in the Ethernet with static IP when you need to use that...
Then just carry both with you.
Click to expand...

Not sure I understand how this would work. I require 'tapped' transparent access to the 'dirty' side of the network, AND also be plugged into the network as a visible node to use the gateway and go out on the Internet.

LC2 said:
Out of interest, will the process you'll be running by some variant of beatbox?
Click to expand...
No, this is sniffing, monitoring gear...


With a direct install the Ethernet dongle is immediately recognised, but unfortunately Wireshark doesn't recognise any of the interfaces except for bluetooth. Aaaargh this is so frustrating. I was expecting it wouldn't see the USB dongle. But I wasn't expecting it not to see the wired ethernet despite the Fedora host working just fine....

Whilst it is fun trying to get this to work, I'm concerned about the stability of it all. I might just have to get a couple of these babies, all in a neat package.
http://www.flukenetworks.com/content/optiview-xg-network-analysis-tablet
 
Unfortunately much lower on the stack, the boring stuff....

I've got to say it is working rather well on my very old Dell Inspiron 9100 Pentium 4 :eek: Still haven't got wireshark to work to capture, but I can schedule network capture separately and it is working well, together with NTOPG and Bandwidthd....

I'll leave it running over the weekend, and do a full days capture tomorrow...But promising never the less....As such I can look for a laptop with a single wired ethernet port...And then have a USB one as well...Happy days...
 
What about something based around a slim ITX board. DC power supply. You could run it headless with a remote X server.
 
Sorry must have cross posted. I have used dumpcap to capture on headless/low power systems. It is in the wireshark-comon package in debian based distros. It will dump pcap-ng files which are great for analysis in wireshark. I wrote an init script to run it as a service, with the last hours captured traffic available as required on a rolling basis. If you are interested I will dig up some more information.
 
That is a nice idea. I was thinking of doing something similar using say a raspberry pi.

The files are good with great information. Just playing with a private cloud shark instance as well to manage the files.

Whilst it is nice and "cheap" I'm going to get a demo of the Optiview XG equipment as well.
 
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