Setup Dual nics for load balancing/failover

thistleair · 05-09-2005, 05:10 AM

Hi All,

Could someone advise me as to how, if at all possible, I can setup a box running RHEL3 with two nics to:

1. Setup a fail-over in the event that one nic dies the other will automatically pick up the traffic.

2. Load balance the traffic over both interfaces

I've had a hunt and come up with nothing, so all and any help would be much appreciated.

TIA

Andy

onewave · 05-10-2005, 04:21 PM

Andy

Who is the manufacturer of the NICs?

Visit their website and look for Linux NIC bonding drivers - bonding will allow you to have multiple NICs act as one NIC with fault-tolerant fail-over, and many bonding drivers have options for round robin load balancing between the NICs.

If your NIC manufacturer does not support Linux bonding, RHEL4 has it built-in.

I just finished bonding and vlan setup on a series of RHEL3 servers, so let me know if you need specific help once you find the drivers.

~ onewave

thistleair · 05-11-2005, 04:18 AM

Thanks onewave

The nics are HP NC7782 Dual Port PCI-X Gigabit nics or variations of. I'll give their drivers a shot and see how well I get on. I may still ask for a bit more help - if you don't mind?!

Andy

onewave · 05-11-2005, 02:31 PM

Sure, no problem.

This should be the driver you need:
http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/fi...oad/22547.html

Its the same one I just setup, so go through the readme:
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/se...0.4t-1.src.txt

and if you have any issues getting it to work I will try to help you out.

Best of luck!

~ onewave

michaelsanford · 05-11-2005, 03:15 PM

This might help:
http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html