Comments on NIC Bonding/Teaming - Debian Sarge

Can I connect each of 2 NICs to 2 ethernet switches? Should be concerned or not?

The ultimate goal of NIC teaming is limiting a "Single Point of Failure"... so Yes, you would *want* to plug each nic into a different switch if possible. However, the switches (or ports) would need to be part of the same VLAN.

Many thanks :)

Success full used on fedora core 4

if u use cisco switches make sure you enable spanning tree if not both nic become active en your network speed will be reduced

I'm attempting this on a debian etch machine, the only difference being that I have two different NICs in this machine. I followed the directions, substituting my drivers in /etc/modutils/aliases in place of the eepro100, but when I restart the networking and try to bring up bond0, I get:

SIOCSIFHWADDR: No such device

Failed to bring up bond0

I'm wondering if my hwaddress line is the problem; what MAC address should I use for it? One of the two NICs, or a different one?

I'm having precisely the same problem and have been working on this for many hours. Did you have any luck resolving this?

I am running Debian 2.6.8-2-686. The ethernet nics are dual Broadcom BCM5721's and as a test I installed their bcm5700 drivers - to no avail.

Any help would be much appreciated - I would love to get this working. Thanks.

Although I believe that the hwaddress entry in /etc/network/interfaces is optional for bonding, adding it with the MAC of either NIC (or even an arbitrary MAC) continues to result in this error for me:

Configuring network interfaces...SIOCSIFHWADDR: No such device

Failed to bring up bond0

Removing the hwaddress entry in /etc/network/interfaces altogether results in several errors:

Configuring network interfaces...SIOCSIFADDR: No such device

bond0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

SIOCSIFNETMASK: No such device

SIOCSIFBRDADDR: No such device

bond0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

bond0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

Failed to bring up bond0

Thanks for the otherwise great tutorial. If I could read the source I would ;-) Any help much appreciated.

Thanks, KB

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1. apt-get install modutils

2. Add in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases and /etc/modutils/aliases

alias bond0 bonding
alias eth0 e100
alias eth1 e100
options bonding mode=2 miimon=100

(I chose mode2 for load balancing instead of round robin nics with mode 0)

3.During debian installation I choosed eth1 as default nic, this implies that in the ifenslave command eth1 come first and eth0 after. My interfaces file is

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
allow-hotplug eth1
#iface eth1 inet static
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up ifconfig bond0 up
pre-up ifconfig eth1 up
pre-up ifconfig eth0 up
address 192.168.1.69
netmask 255.255.255.0
#hwaddress ether 00:14:C6:33:5D:81
gateway 192.168.1.254
up ifenslave bond0 eth1 eth0
down ifconfig eth1 down
down ifconfig eth0 down
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth1 eth0

(I added  down commands since /etc/init.d/networking stop hanged completelly my box)

That's all

I believe that I used the MAC address of eth0. Please let me know if it works for you.

---
BJ Dierkes, RHCE4 - LPIC1
wdierkes [at] 5dollarwhitebox [dot] org
Texas, USA

I used this method sucessfully to configure a dual port Intel Pro 100 Server Adapter on Ubuntu 6.06 with one exception. The modifications to /etc/modutils/aliases needed to be made to /etc/modprobe.d/aliases instead.

Guys,

after reading nearly every article on bonding I felt compelled to add this to the mix.  On RH Enterprise version 4(update 5) i could not get mode 1 bonding working.  it kept using load balancing round robin and as I had both nics connected to different switches in a redundent network topology it was causing duplicate packets which was causing delays when opening web pages on the apaches.

anyway below is the recommended config and the actual working config I hope it saves someone time in the future......

alias bond0 bonding

install bond0 /sbin/modprobe bonding -o bond0 mode=1 miimon=100

alias eth0 bnx2

alias eth1 bnx2

alias eth2 e1000

alias scsi_hostadapter megaraid_sas

alias scsi_hostadapter1 ata_piix

alias usb-controller ehci-hcd

alias usb-controller1 uhci-hcd

install bond0 /sbin/modprobe bonding -o bond0 mode=1 miimon=100 primary=eth0

alias eth0 bnx2

alias eth1 bnx2

alias eth2 e1000

alias scsi_hostadapter megaraid_sas

alias scsi_hostadapter1 ata_piix

alias usb-controller ehci-hcd

alias usb-controller1 uhci-hcd