Nic Bonding/Teaming Howto
 

I know some of you have seen this howto:

http://www.howtoforge.com/nic_bonding


However, some people were having issues getting it working properly. So, I wanted to start the thread and see if this is working for people or not. I just updated it with some key changes (typos... left overs from Woody config) and I think it should work solid now.

Let me know if there are any questions maybe I could help.

Not quite right
 

Hi there,
Have you got this working on RHEL 4 where eth0 & eth1 = bond0 failover mode
and eth2 & eth3 = bond1 in failover mode. I have this working on SLES9 and RHEL3 but not on 4?


paul

What exactly isn't working? Are you getting errors, do the logs note anything...?

I don't exactly have a RHEL box available to me right now, but I might be able to make something happen.

Bonding- trying to understand more
 

I have three internet connections, dsl, satellite and a modem. If i bond all three connections ie eth0 eth1 eth2 then route bond1 to a local network, will the local network get a internet speed equal to the dsl + satellite + modem? And will it share equally to all three, because the dsl is faster than the modem?

modem ---|
dsl ---|---bond1(eth0,1,2)---linux---eth3---|---local network
kuband ---|

Many Thanks

William

I am not exactly sure what you are attempting to accomplish. The main goal of bonding is failover in the event that one of your network links fails. If all 3 nic are bonded, and connected to DSL... your bottleneck (speed limitation) will be that of the DSL link. You're not going to increase your DSL speed by bonding multiple NIC to the DSL connection.

Additionally, all links need to be a part of the same VLAN.

I am working with a Ubuntu server install
2.6.12-10-686
My goal is to get NIC failover such as we have on our AIX servers. If on path fails the other takes over instantly.
I follow the instructions here:
http://www.howtoforge.com/nic_bonding

And I have had some success.
bond0 comes up and it functional, but I think this is a trunk set up rather than failover. All three adapter have the same MAC and I don't think that is correct. In the AIX would the new sudo adapter like bond0 has the mac of the first nic, and when it fails over to the other NIC keeps the address of the first. However, the 2 physical NICs keep there real MACs when you look at the devices. Also neither of the physical nics are up or show up in ifconfig..

When we pull the cable hooked to eth0 the only way we can get the server to fail over, is to initiate a connection from the server to someting .. ie ping some other box. If we don't do this, we can not get to the box from the rest of the network. The other issue is that this config does not come back after a reboot. After rebooting there is no bond0 and no network connection.
Thanks in advance for any insite, I am new to Linux and am getting frustrated with not being able to find the answers I need.
Thanks,
Doug

It would sound to me, that if the 'bond0' device does not load on boot up then you have not configured the module properly in '/etc/modutils/aliases'. You need to add something like the following:

alias bond0 bonding


Once in '/etc/modutils/aliases', you need to run 'update-modules'. This is the Debian way of doing things, and I assume the Ubuntu way. If not, simply add 'alias bond0 bonding' to /etc/modules.conf. You also need the aliases for your physical NICs (I believe).

This type of configuration performs a 'round robin' type network connection. Both NICs are used to send traffic, therefore the traffic comes from the bond0 interface (appearing to coming from the MAC of the bond). If the MAC address changed when the NIC failed over, you would loose your ARP and therefore no connections would come to the box until you re-arped (i.e. ping from the other NIC). So it appears that the bond is infact not configured properly (or there is something different about Ubuntu which I wouldn't think is the case).

Can you paste your '/etc/network/interfaces' config?

Thanks.

50% packet loss
 

just to get it out of the way here is my pings

=================
64 bytes from 10.1.100.61: icmp_seq=25 ttl=64 time=0.060 ms
64 bytes from 10.1.100.61: icmp_seq=27 ttl=64 time=0.063 ms
64 bytes from 10.1.100.61: icmp_seq=29 ttl=64 time=0.062 ms
64 bytes from 10.1.100.61: icmp_seq=31 ttl=64 time=0.061 ms
64 bytes from 10.1.100.61: icmp_seq=33 ttl=64 time=0.064 ms

--- 10.1.100.61 ping statistics ---
34 packets transmitted, 17 received, 50% packet loss, time 33004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.060/0.075/0.285/0.053 ms
mail:~#
=================

I have two machines: mail and argon connected via 2 crossover cables

mail has 3 nics: eth0 = pcnet32 --> lan
eth1 = tulip --> X-over --> argon
eth2 = 8139too -> X-over -> argon

argon also has 3 nics: eth0 = e100 --> lan
eth1 = pcnet32 --> X-over --> mail
eth2 = 8139too --> X-over --> mail

aliases is correct and /etc/network/interfaces should be fine:

auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
address 10.1.100.63
netmask 255.255.255.0
# hwaddress ether 00:02:B3:48:50:2C
# gateway 10.1.100.1
up ifenslave bond0 eth1 eth2
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth1 eth2

I just realized that the HWaddress was commented out. I removed the # and presto it works fine.

I'll leave the full comment, incase someone else runs into this problem.

Vertical

Anyone gotten bonding to work with RealTek cards?
 

I'm using (K)Ubuntu 6.10 and followed the bonding howto, but the RealTek chipset cards don't seem to work -- Anyone have this working with these cheap cards?
They work really well so far stand alone.

multiple bond interfaces on rhel4u4 problem
 

if, on rhel4 update 4, you have working bond0 but have problem with setting up bond1 interface see
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/77672

On my server I set up bonding in /etc/modprobe.conf in this way:
and now it works.

bartek