Channel Bonding

[Timothy I Mattox]

Hello,
Unless the 16 port switch can be configured to handle it (and most can
not as far as I know), you would need two 8 port switches that are NOT
connected together.  Some high end switches have a form of trunking
(I'm not sure which flavor of trunking will work) that can properly
handle having more than one connection appear to have the same MAC
address.  Also, from comments here on the list, it seems that not all
VLAN support is created equal, so splitting a 16 port switch into two
VLANs won't necessarily work either.

The fundamental problem is that channel bonding makes several NICs in
the same box have identical MAC addresses, and that breaks the most
commonly used method(s) for routing ethernet packets inside of switches,
since MAC addresses are supposed to be unique.

Channel bonding is a very effective technique when configured properly.

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001 JParker at coinstar.com wrote:
> G'Day !
>
> If I have 8 nodes each with (2) 100Mb Ethernet cards, and I want to use
> channel bonding.  Can I use (1) 16 port switch, or do I need (2) 8 ports ?
>  If I use the (2) 8 ports, do the switches need to be connected to each
> other or are they isolated from each other ?
>
> cheers,
> Jim Parker
>
> Sailboat racing is not a matter of life and death ....  It is far more
> important than that !!!

-- 
Tim Mattox - tmattox at ieee.org - http://home.earthlink.net/~timattox
   http://aggregate.org/KAOS/ - http://advogato.org/person/tmattox/