[K12OSN] Servers, K12LTSP, and workstation numbers, etc.

[James P. Kinney III]

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 09:41 -0700, Huck wrote:
> Les, both you and the other fellow(sorry deleted the mail accidentally)
> 
> make a point about the network being the bottleneck.
> 
> Is there a way to support multiple Gig-E NICs on a server and have them 
> send out 'blocks' of IP addresses to terminals? to breakup all of the 
> traffic so it doesn't clog a single NIC?

Depending on the switches you have you can do several things:

1. Switch dependent method: port trunking - requires a switch that can
be "managed" to setup the switch to support basically ethernet
"striping" with the bonding module. 
2. Switch independent method: use adaptive load balancing with the
bonding module. This requires that the kernel drivers for the NICs
support changing the MAC address on the fly for each NIC. (NOTE** The
cheap Hawking cards don't work with this as the r8169 driver must be
unloaded to change the MAC address).

What all of the bonding method does is allow multiple Gb NICs to appear
as a single IP address so you have higher bandwidth for the clients.
> 
> I assume since most of this is driven through DHCP that there is some 
> method of telling it to hand out IP's and thus the PXE booting and all 
> traffic via multiple NICS.

Alternatively, you can set up multiple subnets on multiple NICs and
spread the load that way. The rule of thumb we have found is allow
~30Mb/s for each client. Since ethernet maxes out at about 3/4 wire
speed, this allows for 25 clients for each 1Gb NIC. So splitting up the
network to use multiple nics serving multiple subnets requires no
specialty switch hardware either.
> 
> Does anyone know of a write-up/how-to using this method?
> 
> --Huck
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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