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5.6 Internal Installation of Multiple Cards

If your Host-PC already has a suitable motherboard, or if you have connected a PCIe-Bus extender to the Host-PC, you can physically install multiple SP-ICE-3 Cards internally.

However, the network address assignment procedure for the cards and the Host-PC is made simpler, or more complex, according to the choice of IP addressing scheme: IPv6 or IPv4.

Installing multiple cards with IPv6.

For multiple cards, use of IPv6 is without doubt the easier alternative.

  • The IPv6 implementation includes an automatic address assignment and route discovery mechanism, obviating the need for manual intervention[Note 2].

  • The Discovery mechanism is available in this configuration.

RAYLASE GmbH recommends the use of IPv6 for this situation.

Installing multiple cards with IPv4.

When a single card is installed internally, we can rely on the automatic IPv4-Address assignment mechanism (APIPA), running on the card and on the Host-PC, to provide suitable link-local address to both ends of the connection.

Unfortunately, when multiple cards are installed internally, this mechanism alone is not sufficient[Note 1], and it becomes necessary to provide the Host-PC manually not only with an address, but also with routing information for each card, since the IPv4 implementation does not include suitable automatic mechanisms.

Please refer to 5.6.1 How To Assign IPv4 Addresses for Multiple Internal Cards for more details.

Notes

  1. For each one of the multiple internally installed cards, the Host-PC sees a separate network interface (see 5.1 Internal Installation).

    However, because all automatically assigned addresses belong to the same sub-net (169.254.*.*/255.255.0.0), the Host-PC cannot automatically decide which interface to use for a given card's address.

    In the absence of additional routing information, the Host-PC simply tries to use its default interface for all of the cards, which of course is doomed to failure most of the time.

    Consequently, we must make sure that, from the Host-PC's point of view, each card/interface belongs to a different sub-net.

  2. Indeed, it is not normally possible or necessary to assign IPv6 link-local addresses manually.