My home network has a Linux box running IPTables as it’s center point, and, since there are four networks, it has 4 NICs and 4 cables into the switch.  I kept running into problems with the NICs (they would reorder depending on what flavor of Linux was installed), so I wanted to consolidate the NICs down to 2 – one for the Internet link and one for the LAN segments with 802.1q tagging.