[Nottingham] Server/SMP

[Tom Bird]

Alex Herington wrote:
> Tom Bird wrote:
(emnet)
>> I took some pictures of it, http://photos.marmot.org.uk/a/1435
> 
> I remember John Wells coming to us to sell us Emnet connectivity! He 
> mentioned you :) We ended up not going that route because it would mean 
> giving all of our clients new public IPs. I remember being well 
> impressed with the network though!

Good old 'mad dog' wells, I'd not be too sure that anything he told you 
has any grounding in reality, but yes, the network turned out nicely.

>> Getting back to your network for a minute, where possible there's 
>> redundancy in the weaker points, using VRRP or OSPF where appropriate. 
>> You might want to think about that, you can use any old crap PC as a 
>> backup.  To be honest, for routing a few office connections you'd not 
>> touch the sides of a Pentium 90.
> 
> Not a bad idea at all, especially considering it's not really going to 
> cost a lot to do. Tah!

For your network, the best way is with static routes and VRRP.  vrrpd is 
debian packaged: http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/vrrpd -- and 
provides a failover in a matter of seconds.  In this case, i would 
configure this to have the change trigger a script.  Easy to implement, 
gotchas are that if it changes the MAC address on a VLAN you may need to 
either change the MAC address of the other VLANs and the card itself, or 
to flip it into promisc. mode, there's a couple of others relating to 
VLANs in general but you'll probably not encounter them.

Tom