well i think you could insert your dual NIC openbsd host into the
switch 'ring' physically, then bridging between the 2 NICs and firing
up STP, but be aware that every time you up/down an interface or
reboot your openbsd box, you'll trigger an STP recalc - which is
around 45sec outage across entire switch infrastructure. (This can be
mitigated with PVST and RSTP somewhat).
/Pete
On 23 Sep 2008, at 14:51, Dave Wilson wrote:
Pete Vickers wrote:
1. create a layer 2 (switched) ring, using spanning tree.
- completely independent of openbsd box
2. connect your (dual NIC) openbsd box to 2 separate switches for
redundancy, and add both NICs to a trunk group.
- redundancy of switch, cabling and NICs.
Pete,
thanks for your useful and informative reply. A decent example is
worth a paragraph of explanation to me :-)
Whilst I would love to do as you suggest, unfortunately my switches
only have 2 GbE ports each. My hope was to put the routers in the
GbE ring, as otherwise my routers will be bottlenecked by plugging
into 100M ports on the switches. As most of my traffic goes through
the routers this would be a big issue.
I suspect the only way I will really nail down what I can and cannot
do will be to get some new switches and build a router and start
playing around. The thing that I think is most likely to break is
that I already use vlans and carp, and so I will have to work out
the proper way to layer physical, bridge, vlan and carp whilst still
making sure that packets keep going round the ring.
Unless reyk@, porter of the rstp code for bridge, can tell me
different...?
SD
