[Beowulf] how large can we go with 1GB Ethernet? / Re: how large of an installation have people used NFS, with?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 04:15:35PM -0700, Skylar Thompson wrote:

> How do people with large layer-2 networks deal with broadcast storms?

You don't cause them, and you monitor for them.

I haven't seen a wild transmitter in a while. Monitoring means you'll
at least know it's there; quickly dignosing which node is the bad one
can be challenging.

More common is pilot error. Trying to talk to nodes which are down,
for example, causes an arp every time. So don't do that too often.

Modern L3 switches can't discard broadcast packets very quickly, which
makes the issue much more challenging than you might think.

-- greg