Folks, When implementing any trunking between ports, you will need to ensure that both ends of the trunked ports "are talking" the same language. Many vendors have their own proprietry trunk protocol which needs to be implemented at both ends, or a loop will develop and stop your network very quickly. Regards Ian Birdsey Blackboard Associates Ltd. 87 Violet Avenue, Hillingdon, Middlesex. UB8 3PS. Tel: 0709 100 1468 Fax:01895 444216 www.blackboard-associates.com -----Original Message----- From: Edgehill e-mail service [mailto:edgehillit@edgecoll.clara.net] Sent: 05 November 2001 11:51 To: suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] D Link DFE570TX 4 port network card ----------

From: Michael Beddow To: phil@dialsolutions.co.uk; suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] D Link DFE570TX 4 port network card Date: 05 November 2001 11:45

On Monday, November 05, 2001 12:18 PM Phil Driscoll wrote:

...

On the advice of this list, we recently purchased a D Link DFE570TX 4 port network card to use in our new Linux server to give us loads of network bandwidth to the machine.

The card is fitted and working great, and I can imagine various schemes to exploit the four interfaces. Can anyone advise on the best way to do this?

[...]

Does your switch support "trunking" (this is the SMC documentation's term, I'm not sure if it's used by other manufacturers).

Trunking is an accepted term used (or understood) by most manufacturers. Switches varyin their trunking support - some need the IP adresses to be identical across the trunked ports, some need different, others seem to reject anything other than a second trunked switch :( My own (painful) experience says: try it when things are quiet, but you'll need a few volunteers to test the configuration - trunked connections occasionally work perfectly until the first trunked channel is saturated, then take the whole network down. Good Luck. Regards, Paul Ellison ICT Manager Edgehill College

With some SMC switches at least, you can designate two or four ports to be a "trunk", connected either to another switch, or to a multiport NIC. That would give you an 800Mb/s full duplex pipe between your server and the switch. The kiddies could have some fun trying to saturate that!

Michael --------------------------------------------------------- Michael Beddow http://www.mbeddow.net/ XML and the Humanities: http://xml.lexilog.org.uk/ Linux in Schools: http://linux.lexilog.org.uk/ The Anglo-Norman Dictionary http://anglo-norman.net/ ---------------------------------------------------------

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