FTP server link aggregation

Matthew Law matt at webcontracts.co.uk
Wed Dec 15 13:29:13 UTC 2010


I have a single FreeBSD box acting as an FTP server for multiple FreeBSD
and Linux clients on the same /24 subnet (all gigabit ethernet).  It is
currently connected by just one of it's two gig ethernet ports.  I also
have two cisco switches with an etherchannel between them (using 2 x gig
ports on each switch).  I would like to connect the remaining NIC on my
FreeBSD box to the other switch and enable 802.3ad on those switch ports
to aggregate traffic between them.

This is in the hope that it can better serve multiple FTP clients.  Is my
thinking correct?  Other than the network interface changes which are
documented here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-aggregation.html are there any
further tweaks I could make to improve things? -the server is a 'standard
install' and does not use ZFS.  It has an adaptec 5408 RAID card with 4 x
SATA II drives and, IIRC, 128K stripe size and plenty of RAM.

Is there a way of testing this other than initiating large file transfers
to this server from multiple hosts?


Many thanks,

Matt.



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