Firstly I'm moving this to luv-main because it's about serious Linux networking issues. On Sun, 21 Apr 2013, Tony Langdon <vk3jed@gmail.com> wrote:
About to rebuild the network here after moving house. One issue I'm contemplating is performance and redundancy. One part of the network can't (easily) be reached by Cat 5/6, running cables t that part of the house would be too messy at best. I have two ways I can bridge this gap - Powerline Ethernet adapters, which have worked extremely well in the past, or WiFi, using an access point in client bridge mode.
Now the powerline adapters do work extremely well, with a rated speed of 85 Mbps. I've never had an issue, except for the switchmode supply of one laptop, which trashed the link (took a bit of detective work that one!). The biggest weakness of these devices is that they can't be battery backed up. If the mains goes down, so do they.
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/08/04/clusters-dont-work/ I wrote the above blog post about my experience with clusters. Some of this applies to failover of links. One significant difference between a home network and a serious server network is that most of the functions of your home network don't matter much when you are asleep or away. Therefore a redundancy which involves you logging in as root and running a route command will work a lot better on a home network. Of course my experience is that having a sysadmin login as root and manually fail things over is better than any cluster software implementation I've seen, but that's another issue.
WiFi can be backed up, especially since a lot of the gear I have will happily run off a 12V battery, and some of the systems on the far end will be running off a battery backed DC supply. However, performance with the WiFi solution isn't as good.
Is there a way I can (easily and cheaply) arrange to run on the powerline devices by default and fail over to WiFi, if the power goes down?
How often does power go down anyway? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/