About the Dual 1 Gbps (GigE) NICs on ARP Metal dedicated servers

Your ARP Metal™ dedicated server includes two 1 Gbps (GigE) network ports (NICs). We cable both ports to your VLAN but on separate switches. That is, one NIC is cabled to one switch and the other NIC is cabled to a second switch. The ports on both switches belong to your VLAN.

Should one switch fail or otherwise need to be taken out of service, your traffic can continue uninterrupted through the other switch.

To take full advantage of this, we recommend that you use non-proprietary link bonding to establish a high availability scenario for your network traffic.

Examples include:

• The Linux bonding driver

  Use active-backup mode and be sure to set miimon=100

• FreeBSD's lagg(4) interface

  Use failover mode for best results

• OpenBSD's trunk(4) interface

  Use failover mode for best results

Examples

• CentOS 6

  One of our customers wrote up a good tutorial.

• FreeBSD

  Example entries in your rc.conf:

  ifconfig_em0="up"
  ifconfig_em1="up"
  cloned_interfaces="lagg0"
  ifconfig_lagg0="laggproto failover laggport em0 laggport em1 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xx"
  defaultrouter=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Replace the first xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xx with your IP and subnet (e.g. 10.0.0.1/30) and the second xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with your gateway.

If your NIC driver is not em then replace it appropriately (e.g. newer Intel driver is igb)