netrain and mac addresses

[Adam Garsha]

How does netrain adjust mac addresses if a card of a set fails?

e.g. if I have nr0 composed of ee0 and ee2 and ee0 fails, will the Hardware address used by nr0 appear on ee2?

In the example ifconfig listing below. Should ee0 fail, will the switch port connected to ee2 then see 02:0b:cd:2c:ed:74 as its hardware address (after netrain switches traffic to ee2)?

ee0: flags=4000c63
NetRAIN Virtual Interface: nr0
NetRAIN Attached Interfaces: ( ee0 ee2 ) Active Interface: ( ee0 )
HWaddr 02:0b:cd:2c:ed:74

ee2: flags=4000c63
NetRAIN Virtual Interface: nr0
NetRAIN Attached Interfaces: ( ee0 ee2 ) Active Interface: ( ee0 )
HWaddr 00:0b:cd:2c:ed:56

nr0: flags=c63
NetRAIN Attached Interfaces: ( ee0 ee2 ) Active Interface: ( ee0 )
HWaddr 02:0b:cd:2c:ed:74

[Markus Waldorf_1 · Accepted solution]

Hi, good question. I'd like to know the true story myself.

When I tested it some time ago I noticed that the virtual MAC address of the active interface was shifted to the standby interface. However, this was not the case when setting the active interface manually, in which case it used the cards original mac address with a 02 prefix as the virutal MAC address.

However I have not been able so far to get Netrain working properly. My interfaces as seen with "niffconfig -v" are constantly bouncing. You can use netstat -acdnots -I nr0 to check for physical NIC problems.

How is it working for you? Are you using Cisco switches?

[Adam Garsha]

Yes, cisco. Seems to work OK. I can't fail any interfaces on the systems in question so I am not sure what would happen with MAC on our systems.

We had some problems a while back and our network guys worked with Cisco and made the problem go away. It was so long ago, I'll bargain they won't remember what was done. I can ask though.

I was asking because we had a maint downtime last weekend where our network guys had to replace the backplane for our core switch--I was just preparing for trouble, but none came.