<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
<div class="im">> If you have a good swtich, your probably better off aggregating your NIC's<br>
> rather than dedicating on to the HDHR... more overall bandwidth that way.<br>
<br>
</div>Yes, and no. Link aggregation (aka channels, aka bonding) only<br>
*assures* you of a single channel of bandwidth, with the possibility<br>
of greater, with (usually) failover capability.<br><br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I have a relatively low end D-Link Websmart switch that supports LACP configured using IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation on my server. It was a relatively easy setup and while I agree that it's not quite what high end solutions may be capable of, it does balance multiple connections quite well.</div>
<div><br></div><div>802.3ad, as I understand it, purely provides redundancy, and allows multiple conversations to be spread across the links. So, for example, if I have 4 frontends playing video and two HDHR's recording, 3 connections would go across one link and 3 across the other (in theory). If I try to download a file, to my workstation while all of that is happening, I would only see the remaining available bandwidth of one of the links as connections cannot be split across the two.</div>
<div><br></div><div>In other words, my solution is ideal for mythtv where traffic consists of several concurrent connections... but wouldn't do much if your goal is have massive bandwidth on a single connection. At very least it is an improvement over dedicating Gigabit NIC's to a HDHR... as there is a lot of available bandwidth not being utilized, that could be used by a playback stream or two.</div>
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