Re: Ethernet NIC dual homing

Jonathan Lundell
2001-10-30T03:31:08Z

At 7:15 PM -0800 10/29/01, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > ARP isn't going to do much for you once the failure is beyond the
>> local segment, is it?
>>
>
>ARP is broadcast to the layer 2 local segment; link detection refers
>to the layer 1 local segment, which is not necessarily the same.
>
>On the other hand, doing link detection is extremely useful for a
>portable computer: when I plug in my Ethernet cable in a portable
>system I want it to try to start doing DHCP detection and anything
>else that is normally associated with the interface being "up" at that
>time.

I'm not planning to use bonding on my notebook any time soon.

But what I meant was bonding's use of ARP to determine whether the
connection is good (or rather, bad, even when the link is up), when
the connection is routed via level 3. Seems to me you'd need a level
3 protocol (say ICMP) rather than ARP.
--
/Jonathan Lundell.