[olug] reduntant NICS with failover

Brian Roberson roberson at olug.org
Wed Mar 12 02:52:30 UTC 2003


What OS ( I assume linux ;-)

VLAN failover is a crux, you must have a new network admin or an
in-experienced one. asking end devices to be multi-vlan fault tolerant is
like asking your fridge to heat up your dinner, It only works if your
initiated traffic is important. VLAN's are used to create seperate broadcast
domains, so you must use seperate ip segments on each virtual interface, or
use a vlan trunking ( typically 802.1p ) algorithm on each nic to allow your
nics to talk on more than on vlan. and even without default gw's ( perhaps
by using proxy arp on your router interfaces ) thats an unreliable method at
best. IMHO , my viewpoint would be if you need this machine to be this
redundant, make your network redundant enough that any spf will not take
down an ENTIRE vlan. in that case you can still use dual nics and simply use
AFT. there are two utils and hardware I have used in linux, broadcom gigabit
cards and the basp util[1], and the intel pro server adapter and the ians
utility[2]



[1] -- NOTE - not dell specific - just find this technote extremely well
written
http://support.ap.dell.com/docs/network/063my/linux.htm
[2]
http://www.intel.com/support/network/adapter/1000/linux/ans.htm










----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Thacker" <dthacker9 at cox..net>
To: <olug at olug.org>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 6:20 PM
Subject: [olug] reduntant NICS with failover


Our corporate office is reconfiguring their LAN using VLAN's.  I've been
charged with coming up with a way to have the traffic failover if one of the
VLAN's are down.  Anybody done a configuration like this?

Dave Thacker
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