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On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 12:29:46PM -0800, jonathan@dsg.stanford.edu wrote:
> Some vendors use the marketing term "bonding".  Cisco (the giant in
> that market) uses EtherChannel or Gigabit Etherchannel.  Other vendors
> use "teaming".

Vendors (especially in the wintel space) use "teaming" to mean all
sorts of things, from purely link-state based NIC failover, to the
STP-based teaming you can do with our bridge(4), through to LACP-based
load-balancing like agr(4), and many weird and wonderful things in
between.  Every server NIC driver implements its own framework, and
changes behaviour and terminology between versions of that
driver. Trying to figure out exactly what each version of a particular
windows driver does for a particular configuration, so that you can
configure the switch at the other end accordingly, can be intensely
frustrating.

What's worse, I've seen at least one vendor that uses the term
"trunking" to mean this kind of configuration, rather than what
everyone else, including our vlan(4), means by trunking.  And then of
course there are vendors that beleive in doing more perverse things at
the IP level, and then not implementing those properly anyway.

Then there are any number of constraints that can limit the
implementation, from outright bugs to interoperability issues between
vendors to difficulties doing cross-chassis aggregation for both
bandwidth and redundancy goals.  You often wind up using a mix of
these techniques: a bunch of vlans bridged across trunks to multiple
switches, with per-vlan STP instances with alternating root
priorities, and IP-based load distribution between those.  LACP, where
it works right, is a real blessing in comparison.

While a few keywords for some of these terms might help initial
discovery, especially with well-made cross-references between
manpages, I agree entirely that the most prominent keywords should be
the names of the standard protocols implemented (802.3ad LACP, 802.1d
STP, etc)

--
Dan.
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