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.