Two NICs for failover

[andyjeffries]

Is there any easy way to have two NICs configured so that traffic for a given IP address will be delivered to either of them.

I'm new to High-availability work and would like to have two separate NICs in my server, two separate switches and have the traffic go in to the box via whichever card on the same IP address (so if one router goes bang, or a rat chews through one of the cables then the server still responds normally, maybe somehow notifying me that one of them doesn't have any connectivity).

I'm a programmer, so I can handle any scripting, but I've no idea of how to configure Gentoo to manage this nor any reliable way of testing connectivity (that doesn't rely on a specific remote server being up).

Many thanks.
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[nevynxxx]

You need to have switches that can manage this, and having two seperate switches set up for failover is more complicated, unless you have exactly the right switches.

What you wnat to do is "bond" (linux speak) or "team" (HP speak) or create "etherchannels" (cisco speak) the two nicks.

the advantage if you do this with one switch is you will also get the aggregate of the nic's bandwidth when both are working....
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