More ramblings from the annoying route engine guy...

[Devon H. O'Dell]

Joshua Coombs wrote:
So, I've been slowly making progress getting my route schema working 
within LWIP.  This is not the way to learn C.  In any case, after 
chatting on #dragonflybsd I found out that many people are 
interested in something that rolls vrrp/carp/etc functionality in 
with loadbalancing, so loosing an interface doesn't drop a box, etc. 
I just happen to have been spending the last few days pounding on 
Extreme's and wonder if their schema could be of use.

Extreme's are an entirely virtual interface driven system.  For 
simplicity they call their interface's vlans, although they have 
nothing to 802.1q.  IP interfaces are defined by individual vlans. 
These vlans are then bound to one or more physical interfaces.  This 
lets you literally bind say, 192.168.1.1/24 to 4 gigabit ports.  It 
might be cpu intensive, but instead of layering on carp/vrrp could 
this sort of schema work and allow even greater flexibility?

Joshua Coombs 


I think this functionality is called ``etherchanneling'' and it is 
provided on a lot of routers. It sounds cool to me, but it's not really 
similar to CARP or VRRP, where, for instance, if one machine goes down, 
another takes over. I think these two could certainly work hand-in-hand; 
assume two routers which are etherchanneling, one goes down and the 
other takes over.

I'm not familiar with what route schema you are working on, but I'd be 
interested in hearing what you're doing. One thing that would be nice to 
have (that Linux and Windows do and we don't) is multipath routing: the 
ability to send packets via different routes on different interfaces 
either via round-robin or any other applicable algorithm.

I don't know what times you're generally available, but it'd be nice to 
talk to you in #DragonFlyBSD about this work :).

Kind regards,

Devon H. O'Dell