Fault Tolerant Ethernet

Fault Tolerant Ethernet (FTE) is proprietary protocol created by Honeywell. Designed to provide rapid network redundancy, on top of spanning tree protocol. Each node is connected twice to a single LAN through the dual network interface controllers. The driver and the FTE enabled components allow network communication to occur over an alternate path when the primary path fails.

Default time before failure is detected, is Diagnostic Interval (1000ms) multiplier with Disjoin Multiplier (3), for a 3000ms recovery time.

Similar to Switch Fault Tolerance (SFT) in windows and mode=1 (active-backup) in Linux.

Supported hardware and software

 * Windows 7/2003 or newer
 * Honeywell Control Firewall (CF9)
 * Honeywell C300 Controller
 * Honeywell Series 8 I/O

Technical overview



 * Uses Multicast ( 234.5.6.7), for FTE community.


 * Recommended maximum of 300 FTE nodes and 200 single connected Ethernet nodes (A machine with to network cards is considered as two separate single connected Ethernet nodes).
 * Recommended to have separate broadcast/multicast domain, for different FTE communities.
 * Recommended maximum of 3 tiers of switches.
 * Default UDP Source Port: 47837
 * Default UDP Destination Port : 51966