Lan failover

[M. Tariq Ayub]

Hi,

I am using rp5470 with HP-UX 11i base OS. I Have three lan card. I am using only one. iam planning to configure another lan card so that failover can over with same IP. i doonot want to buy MC/SG.
What can i do.

Tariq

[Steven E. Protter]

You can buy another add in product called APA auto port agregation. It runs $1400 for the base OS if my brain is working right.

Beyond that, you have a few rules to follow:
1) You can not have two NIC cards on the same network active. If the addy is 192.168.0.10 and the netmask is 255.255.255.0 the network is the first three octets 192.168.0

If you use /etc/rc.config.d/netconf or ifconfig to configure two lan cards on the same network your networking WILL fail. No doubts, no exceptions.

What we do is have a series of ifconfig scripts for the backup lan cards. If we determine a total network failure we do the following:

lan3 is dead

ifconfig lan3 down
ifconfi lan4 192.168.0.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

We run it manually.

What you can do is run a ping test on the card and if it fails then activate a failover script.

# 1 ping wait 30 seconds for an answer
ping -n 1 -m 30 192.168.0.10
rc=$?
if [ $rc -ne 0 ] then
# activate ifconfig failover
fi

This will work.

SEP

[Alzhy]

If you do not want to splurge megabucks for MC/SG modules then your next best bet would be the Auto Port Aggregation Product (HP APA) - which could be had for ~ $1500. HP APA does not only offer you network redundancy but also does aggregation of "trunking" of a number of network pipes.. If you have say 3 GigE ethernet links and create an aggregation (requires only 1 IP address btw.), you will have a pipe that is therethically 3 x 1 Gig. If one link fails, then the connection will remain with what whatever links remain in the aggregation.
.
Of course if a no-cost solution is preferable, then you can write a PERL, C or Shell code that does what I would call - a "poor man's failover" -- which works should work just as nice...