Re: Ethernet NIC dual homing

Martin Eriksson
2001-10-29T13:22:30Z

----- Original Message -----
From: "Laurent Deniel" <deniel@worldnet.fr>
To: <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2001 6:23 PM
Subject: Ethernet NIC dual homing

>
> Hi,
>
> Does someone know if there is some work in the area of NIC dual homing ?
> By NIC dual homing, I mean two network devices (e.g. Ethernet) that are
> connected to the same IP subnet but only one is active (at IP level) at a
> time. When a faulty condition is detected (e.g. link down or lack of I/O),
> the kernel switches to the second NIC. Such a similar feature exists in
> Tru64 UNIX (NetRAIN), HP-UX (APA) and Solaris (Sun Cluster pnmd).
> What is the best way to handle that in Linux ? I thought about an IP
virtual
> device that could be mapped on two eternet NIC and some ioctl to switch
from
> one NIC to another or a generic virtual ethernet driver that could handle
two
> real ethernet drivers ?

Well, it shouldn't be too hard to modify the bonding driver to do something
like this (?), and instead the most work should (and will) go into the
user-space daemon. That way it would be possible not only to detect faulty
NIC hardware, but also to detect for example a faulty network segment.

Anyone wants to take a shot on this? I'm gonna look into it a bit, because
it sounds like a nice project for me as a linux-kernel-programmer newbie.

_____________________________________________________
| Martin Eriksson <nitrax@giron.wox.org>
| MSc CSE student, department of Computing Science
| Umeå University, Sweden