On 31/01/07, David Ramsden <david@???> wrote:
> You want to look in to bonding, where you can have two NICs for example,
> both plugged in to the same physical network. When bonding has been
> implemented you will see one logical interface. However, if one NIC
> fails everything should continue to work as normal. Note the *should*
> :-) You may find you need switches that support link aggregation.
>
> There is plenty of documentation available for this on Google and also
> by reading Documentation/networking/bonding.txt found in the kernel
> source.
If you read this documentation you'll find that bonding works by
setting the MAC address of both physical interfaces and the bonded
interface to the same value.
http://linux-net.osdl.org/index.php/Bonding#Where_does_a_bonding_device_get_its_MAC_address_from.3F
I may be burned as heretic, but having multiple interfaces with the
same MAC address isn't as scary as people think. It's how many
clustering systems perform fast interface failover.
You'll also note that bonding only works where the physical interfaces
are in the same broadcast domain. Peter at first stated that the
interfaces will never be in the same physical network, so bonding
possibly isn't the most appropriate solution.
G
