Fw: ethernet bonding

[Matthew Lenz]

sorry for the quoting.. originally posted to the debian-user list as well. 
curious what peoples thoughts are.


> tring to do a bit of research on the bond interfaces.  in the description 
> it talks about sending data out the bonded interfaces in a round robin 
> type fashion.  i was under the impression that the bond interfaces were 
> for failover usage.
>
> I've got 9 debian servers broken up into 4 different vlans and each server 
> has two ethernet ports in it.  I've got two identical managed switches. 
> i'd like it so that if any one of the switches were go to down that 
> everything will still function and that if interface A on server 1 goes 
> down that interface B on server one takes over (lets assume that each 
> server has an interface connected to switch A and and interface connected 
> to switch B.
>
> the different vlans are connected to a firewall so that traffic between 
> the vlans (different subnets) is filtered and routed via the firewall. 
> I've got two firewalls and each has all its interfaces connected to one of 
> the two switches.  I've got two wan ethernet connections.. one of each 
> connected to one of each of the switches.
>
> The firewalls are pfsense and use a syncing technique so that if one 
> firewall fails the other takes over.  From what I understand if I have the 
> switches trunked together as long as only one of the interfaces on a 
> server is active at a time i should be able to get this done properly.
>
> Does the ifenslave functionality do this?  do both bonded interfaces 
> always have link?   these are dell 5324 gig switches.. (pretty nice) and 
> run IOS afaik.  If the ifenslave doesn't do what i want I wonder if its 
> possible to make the switches communicate and only have one interface 
> enabled at a time.
>
> Anyone ever do anything like this?