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
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?
On 7/11/10, Jerry Franz jfranz@freerun.com wrote:
On 7/10/2010 2:21 PM, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:
I've been reading that it's possible to set up a system with multiple NIC to provide redundant internet connectivity such that it will switch to a secondary connection if the primary ISP fails.
Is it possible in a similar way to setup redundant LAN routing? I read that it is possible to aggregate/bond multiple NIC to stackable switches that support link aggregation and redundancy. But if only simple switches are available, is something like this possible?
e.g. System A eth0 -> lan switch/router 1 eth1 -> lan switch/router 2
System B eth0 -> lan switch 1 eth1 -> lan switch 2
Then somehow specify that, if lan switch 1 fails, the two systems will switch to using switch 2 so that in case of a switch failure, the network continues to remain operational.
Yes. You can do it. I've done it before. All you need is the right choice of bonding mode . You set up bond0 for eth0 and eth1 and it 'just works'. To make it more robust, cross-connect the two switches as well.
-- Benjamin Franz _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos