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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, 2012 at 21:59

2 Answers 2

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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, 2012 at 21:38
  • s/evil/awesome/
    – MikeyB
    Jan 5, 2012 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, 2012 at 21:41
  • doh. clicked over here from serverfault, did not realize I had switched to superuser. still assuming *nix. :)
    – darkuncle
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:43

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