[Gllug] Debian on SPARC 64bit

[tet at accucard.com]

>>                                                     Solaris has
>> some nice things that aren't quite there yet in Linux, such as
>> multipathing.
>
>Er, what's that? Linux has multi-path routing, and has had it since
>2.2. *Appallingly* documented, but there.

This is either a perfect illustration of why playing with different
Unices broadens knowledge, or it's just illustrating my lack of clue
about Linux :-) As I understand it, multipathing under Linux merely
allows load balancing over routes with equal metrics. Under Solaris,
however, multipathing provides NIC failover, allowing a machine to
share a single floating IP address between multiple NICs, so in the
event of NIC failure, the box stays up and available to the rest of
the network on the same IP address. Very handy at times, even if
Sun's implementation is very innefficient with IP usage, requiring
4 IP addresses per box for the simple 2 NIC case, and worse, they
all have to be on the same subnet (even including the heartbeat
addresses -- any ideas why? Richard?)

>I bow to your greater knowledge (I've been using it on those for ten
>months; six months if you count from the time I got my first non-kernel
>SPARC64 userspace stuff going.)

I've been using Sparc Linux since the very beginning, which led to some
interesting situations. For example, I had access to bigger iron (SS20s
and SS690s) than davem at the time, so ran into problems because he
hadn't written support for the amount of memory in my boxen :-)

Tet


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug