[Cisco Fast Etherchannel, GEC, and "teaming"/"trunking" more apporpriate
  for tech-net; replies directed there.]


re FEC: sure, many other vendors have implemented FEC. I dont know
what the license terms are, and hardware vendors are moving to the
IEEE standard. (read: implementing both, for now).

IEEE 802.3ad specifies a standard way of signalling which MAC
addresses form a ``team'; using the same set of reserved,
low-duty-cycle ethertypes as, uh, other recent 802 extensions.  FEC
has a different signalling mechanism; IIRC, its "proprietary"
but a near-complete draft ended up on the web.

The IEEE rules are quite specific: any given src and dst MAC-addr pair
is supposed to be pinned to one speific interface, to preserve
ordering behaviour of regular Ethernet. Even so, I've seen several
implementations which allow the operator to override that, sending
packets round-robin or shallowest-queue-first within a "team".  This
usuallyrequires operator configuration because (iirc), it violates the
spec.

Unlike most IEEE standards, 802.x is is available online, free: e.g.,
http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.3-2002.pdf


>Heh.  Paging anyone else at all except Jason that wants to share
>this kind of work?

Uh, that'd be me, but I was supposed to be working on a SIGCOMM paper...