Re: [PLUG] Redundant switch configurations

[zuzu <sean.zuzu@gmail.com>]

On 10/30/07, Brian Stempin <brian.stempin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I personally have only used ALB on Windows systems, so I can't make any
> claims as to how well this works or how to do this on Linux systems.
> Perhaps someone else can fill in here?
>

I think this also falls under "trunking" and "link aggregation".  my
investigation into this has been more about merging the bandwidth of
two upstream providers (ISP) without requiring anything on their end,
using a Linux server.  e.g. a friend of mine worked in India for a few
years and the ISP service there was relatively slow but inexpensively
priced, so he had to combine several ISP accounts into what looked
inside his LAN as a single fat pipe.  or, I know that Verizon's
current pricing scheme of $45 for 15/2 but $180 for 30/5 means that
for the same $180 you could aggregate 4 15/2 lines for 60/8 Mbps
total.

the way to achieve this with a solid Linux router seems to be with
Iproute2.  (I've often thought that a dedicated embedded Linux device
to do this one task but do it so well that it "just works" ala DD-WRT
would be a very marketable device for about $200.)

HTH.

http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2
http://www.policyrouting.org/iproute2.doc.html
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2_examples
http://ornellas.apanela.com/dokuwiki/pub:firewall_and_adv_routing

Introduction

Iproute2 is a collection of utilities for controlling TCP / IP
networking and traffic control in Linux. It is currently maintained by
Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@osdl.org>. The original author, Alexey
Kuznetsov, is well known for the QoS implementation in the Linux
kernel.

Most network configuration manuals still refer to ifconfig and route
as the primary network configuration tools, but ifconfig is known to
behave inadequately in modern network environments. They should be
deprecated, but most distros still include them. Most network
configuration systems make use of ifconfig and thus provide a limited
feature set. The /etc/net project aims to support most modern network
technologies, as it doesn't use ifconfig and allows a system
administrator to make use of all iproute2 features, including traffic
control.

iproute2 is usually shipped in a package called iproute or iproute2
and consists of several tools, of which the most important are ip and
tc. ip controls IPv4 and IPv6 configuration and tc stands for traffic
control. Both tools print detailed usage messages and are accompanied
by a set of manpages.
[edit] Download

The current and past versions are in the download directory. The
latest version is designated by the iproute2-latest link.

The packages are signed with a GPG key. See
http://developer.osdl.org/dev/iproute2/signature.html for information
on how to download the public key and validate.
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