Messages in this thread | | | From | Mike Whiten <> | Subject | Using ARP for load-balanced, high-avail ethernet | Date | Sun, 25 Jul 1999 19:39:47 -0400 |
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The company I work for has a need for high-availability ethernet and over the weekend a couple of us banged out a proposal for tweaking ARP (both cache and protocol) to achieve this. An outline of the idea is here:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/mwhiten/
The design goal is simple. Rather than have the kernel treat the NIC as *the* connection to a network, treat it as *part* of a connection to a network. If a network card dies or there is a cable cut, you would only experience a degredation of service. No switchover is necessary. That's the "high-availibility" part. It also seems straightforward to load-balance the traffic on a packet-by-packet basis or according to some other strategy.
We might be able to bang out a patch in a couple of months (we have other work to do) but thought the information would be useful here. Neither of us has attempted to patch Linux before so we have a lot of reading to do. However, the changes we are proposing border on trivial for someone intimately familiar with the networking code in Linux.
At any rate, comments, criticisms and/or suggestions are appreciated.
Mike
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