Re: Anyone successfully bonding 2 ether ports?

Hi Pete

Re being faster..

I am a bit rusty on this, but if you setup the box with 2 ports configured with (say) one IP address your connected layer 2 switch also needs some intelligence to know that you are running it this way. Cisco L2 switches for example allow you to combine their physical ports for backbone and higher bandwidth situations.

The basic problem is ARP or the broadcast/learn facility whereby a hardware (usually MAC) address is married up with the IP address. A more simple L2 switch will get confused that the IP address is appearing on two of its ports and might even just continually switch its own ARP table between them! From memory Cisco's CDP use to get into trouble and had to be disbled if you setup a "loop" between two of their devices (eg connecting two L2 switches with two cables) in this way.

And true to form I cant dredge up the name/function that was used to describe/configure this. It's been a while! I use to run a 100 user enterprise that had 5 Cisco switches backboned with two cables per master<>remote connection and two connections from each main server to the master switch. Never did do any measurements to check whether it was faster, it just seemed an intelligent thing to do at the time because the LAN had a lot more network I/O than the "usual" office environment.

Another thing to keep in mind is that ethernet cards in PC's may require a fair slice of CPU grunt to do things. I remember that the first "older" 1GB cards could only really sustain 200-300MB/sec for this reason. The fix at the time was to buy ethernet hardware that had its own onboard processor to push the data into memory in DMA mode, thus reducing the main CPU overhead. Whether this is still the case nowadays I dont know, Ethernet specs never seem to publish throughout, only sync speed!

Just some things to keep in mind..

Cheers Bob

Pete Puma wrote:
Is it faster to have 2 ports? Not sure, but if your I/O is being sliced an
diced over two ports, you have to think it IS...

Anyway, a fun project for someone with medium to light skills...
.

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