Linux ethernet bonding like driver

[Anshuman Kanwar]

Hi all,

I have a situation where my servers (Freebsd Solaris
and Linux) are connected to two independent switches
via 2 seperate NIC cards. To enhance my redundancy I
want to group 2 adapters  in a active-standby failover
mode, with a single IP flipping between the two.

Under Solaris I can do this with nafo or more recently
ipmp. Under Linux I can use the Ethernet bonding
driver in mode=1 to get this behavior. I did not find
any ready made solutions for FreeBSD so i coded my own
perl script to look at ifconfig and do a failover
based on "status" ... it can also ping  a couple of 
IPs and figure if the link is up but connectivity has
gone down. It fails over any aliases, fixes arp table,
takes care of vlans and moves the def route. I'd be
happy to share if anyone is interested.

So what is the issue ?

Well, I would like to achieve faster failover times
than my script currently gives (~5 seconds). The linux
driver does a failover in < 100 ms. It uses MII status
to detect link loss.

So in FreeBSD is there a way to implement a virtual
driver which can team 2 or more physical adapters in a
failover group ? I would appreciate some pointers on
where to get started.

Thanks,
-ansh

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