[Server-devel] Aternative setting for eth0 on servers that are not #1

[David Van Assche]

Hi Martin,
   Having worked in both 1 and 2 nic situations, what I've found often
happens, and it doesn't really matter what distro or release, is that
eth0 and/or eth1 often get blocked somehow... almost always something
happens kernel side to disable one of the nics... This of course then
catapults either the interior lan or internet access to no-man's land
and we are left trying to reset the nics via tricky kernel commands (I
found no way, other than to restart with a different distro, let it
catch the nics with its kernel, then restart, to fix this) I've now
seen it happen multiple times on the Fedora based system we had at OLE
Nepal... plus that, though it makes sense in most situations to make
the nics dhcp, with a server setup, so you can be sure which of the
nics is acting as dhcp server it doesn't (you definitely don't want 2
on the network.) I'd vote to make both nics static and have an option
for one nic in cases where bandwidth/traffic shaping is no issue... so
within the setup script, ask what is wanted, giving
advantages/tribulations of both... I've never had any problems with a
1 nic setup, except issues of security and no bandwidth shaping, but
its difficult to measure how those things really affect the network
without breaches and excessive you-tube usage, which a centralised
dansguardian is usually gonna block anyway...

just my 2 or 3 cents...

David Van Assche,
Educaction IT Consultant

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 6:00 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Wad,
>
> now that I am revamping the networking setup, the 'secondary servers'
> may only have eth0. It makes sense to set them with their main address
> on eth0 rather than on eth1.
>
> Agree/disagree? What would you use eth0 for on those machines?
>
> We are talking about the multi-server scenario depicted in
>
>  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Configuration_Management#Large_School_Scenario
>
> [As a sidenote, I may also add an option for single-nic server 1 roles
> where the sysadmin may want the only NIC available to be LAN. This is
> relatively easy to do, shift the MAC addr in the udev rules file -
> eth0 will fail to come up, but that does not affect any service. ]
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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