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Similar to most laptops, I have both wifi and wired LAN. Does this mean I have two NICs, or is it one NIC shared between both.

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Two, Zwei, Dos, Ni – kobaltz Jan 5 '12 at 21:59

migrated from serverfault.com Jan 5 '12 at 21:40

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It's definitely two NICs. Though they both carry IP as people would expect, they are not the same at the MAC or (especially) PHY layers. Ethernet follows the 802.3 standards; and most people are familiar with the 802.11 standards for WiFi.

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I suppose someone could do something evil with a switch on the MII bus to make it talk to different PHYs, but I've never seen this myself... – voretaq7 Jan 5 '12 at 21:38
s/evil/awesome/ – MikeyB Jan 5 '12 at 22:14
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Pull up a linux terminal and type ifconfig -a for all the gory details. If on Windows, pull up a command prompt and type ipconfig /all.

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That's ipconfig -a for a Windows box... The default output of ifconfig on *nix boxen usually shows all the most pertinent details. – Chris S Jan 5 '12 at 21:41
doh. clicked over here from serverfault, did not realize I had switched to superuser. still assuming *nix. :) – darkuncle Jan 5 '12 at 21:43

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