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