[CentOS] Redundant LAN routing possible?

[Jerry Franz]

On 07/10/2010 09:48 PM, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:
> Thanks for the suggestion, I'll read up more about them. The
> bond0 and just works sounds simple which is a Good Thing!  The problem
> was the last time I tried to cross connect multiple switches,
> everything just died so there must be something a bit more involved?
> :D
>
>    

Not really. You should connect the 'uplink' port to a regular port or 
use a cross-over cable to connect switches (assuming your switches don't 
auto-switch ports) and make only one connection between each switch and 
the next. I've got four switches chained here in my house right now 
without a problem to distribute my internet connection around various 
rooms using cheap retail 5 port d-link switches. Just don't create loops 
or other weird architectures, don't chain too many together, and you 
should be fine.

> In the mean time since my post, I came across STP (spanning tree
> protocol) that seems to be designed to handle this sort of thing, i.e.
> figure out the shortest path and prevent network shortcircuit like
> what I had experienced with cross connecting multiple switches.
>
> But it apparently takes 50 seconds to reconfigure anytime sometime in
> the circuit fails. There is supposedly a Rapid STP that only takes 3
> seconds. Several couple-of-years old search results indicate that it
> was tested in 2.4 kernel and will be in 2.6 kernel. However, I cannot
> seem to find anything newer that confirms if such functionality is
> really in the current kernel. Anybody has any idea?
>
>    

You probably don't need to worry about STP unless you are using 
explicitly bridging the servers' NICs. And hopefully your hardware is 
reliable enough that worrying about a 50 second reconfiguration is 
something that happens once in several years in the first place.

-- 
Jerry Franz