Snap 410 on Single Subnet - Load Balancing or Failover??

[teastman]

Snap 410 on Single Subnet (one Netgear Switch) my DHCP is my Win 2003 SBS Primary Domain Controller.

My 410 has two network ports. The manual for the 410 says both ports set to "Standalone" on the same switch for a Single Subnet is a no-no.

If I want to use both ports for redundant connection on a Single Subnet should I set these as Load Balancing or Failover??

I am connecting to ONE netgear FS750T2 switch.

Thanks all

[blue68f100]

Failover, should come active if the main one is lost. But connecting to the same switch will not give you redundency. If you loose the switch both are lost.

[teastman]

Okay - thanks.

From what I'm reading on Load Balancing it analyzes network traffic and basically evens out the incoming and outgoing load right? Does that eat an undue amount of resources to do that? I have one Gig of RAM in this box.

Next question but related. Both of these NICs are set to have fixed IP addresses (192.168.1.200 and 192.168.1.201). Should I set these back to aquire an address from my DHCP before I switch to Failover?

Since I have only the one network switch in house - if it goes down the whole office goes down anyway so I guess having this 410 set to Failover would be okay if Load Balancing eats a lot of resources.

[Phoenix32]

David,

Am I the only one who knows what "Wikipedia" or search engines like "Google", "Ask", "Live Search", and "Clusty" are used for? You know, quickly looking up information on the internet. But then I guess it is just easier to ask people to spoon feed you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_ba...28computing%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failover

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_multi-link_trunking

Everything most people ever wanted to know about the network options available on the Guardian OS. Took me about 3 minutes to find those links on Wikipedia. Forget the last two if you do not want to buy a managed switch and have Guardian OS v5.x

Bottom line is, unless you have enterprise type equipment (like a managed switch) and that type of knowledge level, you probably should not be using these other networking modes.

[blue68f100]

Let me see, I have a GigE managed switch and a SMB routers that supports these and both support vlans, too. And I am using vlan. But it does sound like he needs to read up on what he is tring to do.

With only 1 switch I would not bother.

I prefer using reserved IP over static IP. This will assign the IP of your choosing based on MAC address. This way the snap can be set to DHCP and if your forced to move it, it will always get an IP address.

[Phoenix32]

Yes, I am aware I am just a big ole meany. But Geeech..... If he had been reading on it as he indicated, he would have seen this was beyond him and his equipment.

Originally Posted by blue68f100

Let me see, I have a GigE managed switch and a SMB routers that supports these and both support vlans, too. And I am using vlan.

Heh, but you are not him and you do have that type equipment and knowledge to make an informed decision.

Originally Posted by blue68f100

But it does sound like he needs to read up on what he is tring to do.

Ya think!

Originally Posted by blue68f100

With only 1 switch I would not bother.

I myself would change that to read, "with only 1 unmanaged switch", JMO

Originally Posted by blue68f100

I prefer using reserved IP over static IP. This will assign the IP of your choosing based on MAC address. This way the snap can be set to DHCP and if your forced to move it, it will always get an IP address.

Ditto... Let the DHCP deal with it (reserved IP based on MAC)

[teastman]

One of the reasons people go to user forums is to bounce ideas off people who have "been there and done that". In this case it is an office Department server which has been dropping offline periodically and I needed answers quickly.

So Phoenix - when you first started out you knew all there ever was to know about Snap servers and how to best use them in an office environment huh?

Of course you did.

Thank you very much for your help.

[blue68f100]

You said the problem is dropping off line. This is the type of problems we are use to seeing. Most know how to do the setup for their enviroment. In your case dropping off line and setting up a redundant connection are 2 different problems. The setup is normally addressed by snap techs during the free 30/90 days software support.

Need to know how many users are connected, are you using snapshots and/or AV. And what is the specific error message you get? Server not found?

1st is look at the system log and see what it reads. This is where you will need to concentrates your efforts.

I would set the second port to a static ip or dhcp. This way when if drops off you can make a connection to port #2 and look at the log. If you can not connect at all and the led's on the front panel are normal you will be forced to reboot the server. Then look at the log file. The problem sit reboots is that you have all of the startup records to get past. Know the time will help get past these. Without any errors on to what the problem is it will be hard to fix. Also look at the leds on the nic port and see if they are normal.

The GOS is good about reporting problems with hardware and kernel.

If your using a SNMP server the snap can send errors/problems to it. And most SNMP servers support email and/or pager allerts. This is very useful in tracking down problems.

Another thing that will knock if off line is for someone to use the same IP as the snap. As you know you can not have 2 devices on a network with the same IP. So if your dhcp server is giving out this IP there is a problem, another thing to look at.

Since you have a managed switch make sure you have the latest firmware.

[Phoenix32]

Originally Posted by teastman

One of the reasons people go to user forums is to bounce ideas off people who have "been there and done that". In this case it is an office Department server which has been dropping offline periodically and I needed answers quickly.

I did not see a lot of "idea bouncing" in your message. Just very general questions on the very basics. And, forums are not the best place to go when you need an answer "quickly" since it may take a day or two to get your replies. Spending 5 minutes looking it up on the internet and another 30 minutes reading the info you looked up is much faster in most cases, as I showed you in my first reply.

Quite often, people mistake a forum as a place to go get information spoon fed to them that they were just too lazy to look up, which is exactly what you were doing. How do I know that? Simple. The information you were asking for was easily found in less than 3 minutes on a search engine for the words "load balancing" and "failover" and the information those searches provided your answers in les than 5 minutes of reading. Meaning, you didn't even bother to try to find the information before you asked it or you would have found it pretty quickly.

Further, look at your own first two messages in this thread. Where in there did you tell anyone what the probem was so they could give you possible solutions? If you want to "bounce ideas off of people who have been there done that", maybe you should tell them the problem that needs solved. DUH!

Originally Posted by teastman

So Phoenix - when you first started out you knew all there ever was to know about Snap servers and how to best use them in an office environment huh?

Of course you did.

Nope, but then I did a little research on the subject for the basics before I started asking questions and sounding like an idiot. Also, it is pretty obvious my learing curve is much steeper than yours because I seek knowledge in an efficient manner by looking up and reading the tons of material easily found on the internet.

Originally Posted by teastman

Thank you very much for your help.

You are very welcome. I hope my short lesson on how to gather information on a subject witht he internet will be helpful now and in the future. Always happy to help those who need it.



Just curious, has anyone reading this figured out yet that this is one of my pet pieves after being an active member of this forum for a long time? And while I am way more vocal about it, I can assure you David and some others feel the same way. We get bombarded with questions in the message threads, PMs, and emails where the answers have been given a hundred times already.

Most of the time, the answers can be found with a simple search on the adaptec/overland knowledge base, in the WIKIs provided here, in past message threads here on the forum, or a simple search engine lookup. It can become quite annoying after a while when you know the question you are answering could have been looked up in less time that it will take you to type the answer you are giving for the 100th time. This is one of the reasons my activity on this forum is slowly but surely fading away and why some others have quit coming here as well. I am just not interested in wasting my time spoon feeding people who are too lazy to help themselves on the basics.