NIC Teaming

[Ayman Altounji]

Using CPQANS.NLM for NIC teaming with Compaq (Intel) dual port NICs to aggregate bandwidth on Bay layer 2 switch. After talking to Compaq, we rearranged the load statements from the examples.txt file and got ALB mode to work once. Since then, ALB won't work, only NFT. Seems to fail after the "LOAD CPQANS MODE=ALB" line, after that when I try to commit the team, it errors out with the message that the NICs don't support the same frame types as the team. Running pure IP, so I only need Ethernet_II to load. "CPQANS MODE= ALB" loads 802.2 by default.

How do I keep 802.2 from loading to allow ALB to work in pure IP environment?

Using N100.LAN=2/2000, v5.7, CPQANS.LAN=2/2000.

[Ayman Altounji]

What's your autoexec.ncf? Here is mine,

LOAD CPQANS FRAME=ETHERNET_II NAME=CPQANS_EII
LOAD N100 SLOT=401 FRAME=ETHERNET_II NAME=N100_1_EII
LOAD N100 SLOT=402 FRAME=ETHERNET_II NAME=N100_2_EII
BIND CPQANS N100_1_EII
BIND CPQANS N100_2_EII
LOAD CPQANS MODE=ALB
LOAD CPQANS COMMIT
BIND IP CPQANS_EII ADDRESS=x.x.x.x MASK=x.x.x.x GATE=x.x.x.x

Hope it helps,
Y.W.Ng

[Ayman Altounji]

I am confused. I installed NC3122's in two servers. A 1600R December 99 and an ML370 last July. I used LOAD NFT, then the N100 drivers, bound them and then per the NWTEAM.TXT instructions, NFT BALANCE statements. Fault tolerance always worked, but recently I found that the secondary NIC was spending most of it's time sending NCP errors instead of data. It seemed to us that the problem was that workstations were getting reply packets from a MAC address it didn't expect because ALB uses different MAC addresses for each NIC. Now I want to reconfigure these NICS for FEC because we are using Catalyst 5000 switches.
What throws me is the support packs I'm looking at now talk about CPQANS.NLM and I'm unsure what relation it has to NFT.NLM. Is CPQANS required? Where can I get an overview of these issues?

[Ayman Altounji]

CPQANS.LAN replaces the function that NFT.NLM uses.
Basically CPQANS.LAN can be bound to the N100 or N1000 and IP/IPX can be bound to CPQANS.

Architecturally this is a better implementation.
Before NFT had to be loaded before you started doing things.
Now CPQANS can be loaded, changed after N100, N1000 is loaded.

mark-

[Ayman Altounji]

Thanks MASTRATTON for your assistance .....

[Ayman Altounji]

Is there any documentation on CPQANS.NLM? It switches? How you would use it in an environment where you've imported your LAN settings from Autoexec.cfg into Netinfo.cfg using INETCFG? If you edit the Netinfo.cfg file, the system will detect tampering and fail to load the config.

The NWTeam.txt file isn't very forthcoming about parameters or usage.

Thanks,

James J. Makowski, CCNA