Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
Graham Wood wrote: > >> My thought was that this may degrade the reliability of DRBD by it >> not having its own private communication channel. > If you were to bond the NICs, then there is certainly the possibility > that other network access to the server could flood the network. > However, it's unlikely that enough data could be thrown at them to > flood a 2Gbps connection. > > Other problems relate to the data going out on the "public" network, > and the possibility of an IP conflict causing other problems (e.g. if > a 3rd machine on the network accidentally, or on purpose if someone > was trying to "attack" your storage, was set to the same IP as one of > the nodes). Well, everything that has access to these servers is on the 192.168.1.0/24 network, and I'm the only one with any access, so, something coming up on the same IP is possible, but unlikely. Good point though. > >> Or is bonding everything together so that it all can run at 2Gbps a >> good idea? > The extra bandwidth is only relevant if you are seeing a bottleneck > within your system. If the filesystem is working well without any > delays, then the additional bandwidth is not that relevant. The main > advantage of bonding the interfaces would be the increased redundancy. > By the sound of it, your system has single connections between each > device in the environment - which means that a single NIC/cable > failure could cause one of the servers to disappear. > > Personally I think the best answer would be to bond the interfaces > (dual active), and then use VLANs on top to keep the traffic > segregated. This gives you the additional redundancy and bandwidth, > as well as still keeping the internal data separate from public data > to prevent the accidents/attacks discussed above. The downside to > this is that the switches would need to support it - and if you want > to keep the networking redundant you would need a pair of pretty > recent switches to support the dual active functionality - since with > so few nodes involved, the various methods that don't need switch > support probably wouldn't help much. Yeah, one of the big benefits I saw to it was the redundancy it offered. Thanks for the info. Also, someone earlier asked if the disks could keep up with the 2Gbps - from running hdparm -tT, it would appear they can outperform 1Gbps by just a little, but could not keep up with 2Gbps. Again, I was very interested in the redundancy offered, as well as the potential for a bit more speed, but didn't want to have issues with too much different traffic on the network. Thanks again to all that responded.