Point to point link priority

[samba_man]

Background - we are a twin site school with two point to point links running between them, a gigabit microwave (fibre from switch to unit) and a 10 meg radio (copper from switch to unit) for backup. We have a HP Procurve 2610-24 at each end.

 

When we plug both links in the radio is hammered and ping responses are terrible but as soon as we disable the port for the radio everything goes back to the microwave and eveyone is happy again. We would like the microwave to take the bulk of the traffic and use the radio if that one looses connectivity.

 

Surely we can't be the only place with a backup link

 

Any suggestions?

[alunmjones]

id have gone with something like the NETGEAR ProSafe VPN Firewall FVS336G, it has two wan ports and 4 lan ports all 1gb, it can do auto fail over on the wan ports, so wan1 would be main and if it cant see anything at the other end of wan1 it auto tries wan2,

 

what have you got linking your two units together, just the switch?

 

id guess youd probably get it sending strange routing information if it has two links active at the time without some failover implimated.

[SYNACK]

Just use STP on the switches. Elect one switch the master and push the interface prefference way up on the gig link, both links will be active but the slow one will remain in blocking mode till the other one drops. You will need to put both interconects in full STP mode so they run the whole lot of STP checks and behave appropriatly. Simple and effective as multiple cross connects are exactly what STP was designed for.

[samba_man]

Thanks dudes, we'll do a bit of research down the spanning tree route, what you say does make sense.