Member Avatar for rkruz

How can one configure a LAN to have redundant links to a single NIC or MAC address? This would be called fault tolerant so that if one link failed the other link would still provide data. The flow would be 2 - 100BaseT links from a server to router/switch for 2 links to router/switch and to a single NIC/IP address.

Would duplicate data be sent on each link and the receiver somehow select one or would the router reconverge to the redundant link by sensing a link failure and reconverging to the backup link?

Any thoughts or literature you might refer me to so that I could understand how to do this or if it can be done?

Thanks for any tips

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by chris5126
Member Avatar for chris5126

you can do this a number of ways. SMLT (split multi link trunking) IPMP (IP multi pathing) etc etc but first you should tell us what software and hardware your using as some o/s e.g sun support IPMP in software and most routers will support (SMLT) in hardware or you can use both hardware and software!!

Member Avatar for rkruz

Nortel 8600 router/switches. We cant really have with the host software but the OS is solaris. We are putting in a network manager on a separate PC using windows.

Member Avatar for chris5126

Well solaris supports both IPMP and link aggrigation and they do it very well i know the nortel 8600 supports the link aggrigation so would def suggest that. The command you need to look at is dladm the man page or sun solve documents are very useful

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