*BSD News Article 87310


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From: gbuchanan@localhost.on.sympatico.ca (Gardner Buchanan)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
Subject: Re: Running several networking cards in one system?
Date: 22 Jan 1997 00:06:17 GMT
Organization: Sympatico
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <5c3llp$l1p$1@news1.sympatico.ca>
References: <6OBfLaMbNgB@me-tech.pfm-mainz.de> <5aqmnv$m5k@innocence.interface-business.de> <5ar8e1$prf@nike.volvo.se> <5ari97$o01@innocence.interface-business.de> <6OVunZMMNgB@me-tech.pfm-mainz.de> <5b05fe$4aj@innocence.interface-business.de> <6OW5ep16NgB@me-tech.pfm-mainz.de> <5c12d0$pjl@colwyn.owl.de>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.misc:1975 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:5684 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:34402 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:5225

In article <5c12d0$pjl@colwyn.owl.de>,
	tron@lyssa.owl.de (Matthias Scheler) writes:
>In article <6OW5ep16NgB@me-tech.pfm-mainz.de>,
>	mschmidt@me-tech.PFM-Mainz.de (Michael Schmidt) writes:
>> With load balancing I mean that the drivers or administering processes of
>> the   system (FLEET in QNX) check which networking card is under more load
>> than the  other ones and then balance the load and distribute the network
>> traffic among   the networking cards, ...
>
>I don't think that this makes sence for two reasons:
>
>a) Many protocolls especially UDP are bound to a single IP address. Mixing
>   the interfaces could cause heavy problems with e.g. NFS.
>

Yes, but a clever arp server could cause clients to access one or another
physical adapter, each of which has the same IP address.  This is actually
useful to provide redundent network access points.  VAX clusters can do
this and provide somewhat fault tolerant (and exruciatingly slow) NFS service.

On the subject of fault tolerance, has anyone worked on or thought about
a fault tolerance technology for FreeBSD?  Maybe something easy like the
add-on failover software for SunOS and others.  Maybe something really
fancy like VAX clusters built around a shared SCSI bus.

============================================
Gardner Buchanan    <gbuchanan@sympatico.ca>
Ottawa, ON