How do I set up IP over FC?

Solution 1:

Yes it's possible (it's RFC2625) , I did this ONCE to get me out of a major problem I was having at a remote site and although it worked well enough to allow me to transfer the driver file that had me locked out of the box in all other ways I can't say I'd recommend it.

Sure it'll be fast and reliable but it was crazy complex to setup and maintain so I'd suggest you review why you want to do this rather than the more routine IP over Ethernet?

As for how to do it, well I'm getting old and I did this about 18-24 months ago so the relavent brain-cells must have died because I've forgotten but I did use THIS link plus a hell of a lot of googling around. Reckon it took me 6 hours of messing about by the way.

As I say, you can do it but I'm not sure you should.

Solution 2:

Usually you have to enable it on the switch (usually goes with an extra license and some $$$). Also your HBA has to have support for IPFC. It might be that you need to have a switch in between the HBAs. After you enabled it on the switch you basically need the proper HBA driver wich will bring up the device. As described in the link Chopper3 provided most HBA drivers seem to be dropping the IPFC code.

If the driver supports that ie the bfa drivers (for Brocade HBAs) will output something like this in modinfo:

# modinfo bfa
filename:       /lib/modules/2.6.27.19-5-default/updates/bfa.ko
version:        2.3.0.0
author:         Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
description:    Brocade Fibre Channel HBA Driver fcpim ipfc

Which tells you that fcpim, ipfc (fibre channel protocol initiator mode and IPFC) are supported.

A word of warning: It seems that Linux has dropped the IPFC stack support, so the HBA driver won't bring up the proper device.