markm75 wrote:
Yes, it's called trunking.
Network Trunking for PM/Ethernet Administrator's Guide
http://www.pccluster.org/faq/en/refe...-trunking.html
You don't really need to have any support for this within the ethernet
switcher, but hopefully the switcher won't interfere with it; I'll
explain that later. How the trunking software works is that it creates a
virtual ethernet MAC address, which then assigns to all of the physical
ethernet ports involved in the trunking. Those ports then broadcast and
receive using the virtual MAC rather than their own physical MACs. To
all intents and purposes, it looks like there is another ethernet card
on the network.
Where the ethernet switch may interfere with this process is if it gets
confused by seeing the same MAC address coming over multiple ports. The
etherswitch maintains its own ARP cache where it caches the MAC
addresses connected to each port. If a MAC address appears in the ARP
cache on multiple ports, the etherswitch would ideally direct network
packets to all of these relevant ports in a round-robin fashion.
However, if the etherswitch is too dumb (or perhaps, too smart) it will
only direct all of this traffic to only one of the ports and ignore all
of the other ports. That would just nullify all of the advantages of
trunking because all traffic would be directed to one port, and one port
only.
Yousuf Khan
