On Fri Dec 5 20:25 , David Alexander sent: >Several people here assume you want a bridge to tie all your >interfaces together. You can go to the trouble of doing that, but >why? The NET5501 is the first Soekris box that can actually saturate >the 100Mbit link. With that in mind I had high hopes that bonding >several nics together might make up for the fact that I was moving my >server from a Gbit capable box to the Soekris. Alas, bonding the nics >didn't provide any real throughput improvements, at least not >according to my primitive tests. The 5501 can really only saturate a >single link at a time. If someone else thinks otherwise I'm all ears.
First do you understand the difference between bridging and aggregation? If you were trying to bridge multiple interfaces together to the same switch, or interconnected switches, spanning tree should put all but one into a blocked state, so you get no bandwidth increase, just a slow fail over path. Now if you set up a link aggregation (sometimes called by the ambiguous term "trunking"), you can increase your bandwidth in general use. However you have to be aware of how the hashing algorithm is set up that picks which link to use for any given packet. Often it hashes on the IP address pair. This is done intentionally to put any given flow on the same link to lower the probability of out of order packet delivery. But it also means that if you only test an aggregate with one pair of boxes, you're again only using one link. Some switches and devices support round robin, which should boost your bandwidth, but you risk out of order packet arrival. And after all that, I have no idea if the 5501 could saturate more than one link, just that under those circumstances it won't even try. -Jed _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
