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SubjectUsing ARP for load-balanced, high-avail ethernet
Date

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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