NIC Bonding is a technique in which multiple Network Interface Cards (NICs) are logically bonded together and presented as a single interface to the outside world.
Before activating bonding it is recommended that the NICs are working alright. mii-tool can be used for this:
$ sudo /sbin/mii-tool
eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD, link ok
eth1: negotiated 100baseTx-FD, link ok
Bonding Driver in the Kernel
The first thing is to check whether the bonding driver module is already loaded or not.
$ sudo lsmod|grep bonding
If you do not see anything in the output then the bonding driver is not loaded. Most distribution’s default kernel compiles and installs the bonding driver module. To find out whether your distribution has the bonding driver module available. Use the following command:
$ sudo /sbin/modprobe --list | grep -i bonding
/lib/modules/2.6.8-2-386/kernel/drivers/net/bonding/bonding.ko
The output of the command shows that the bonding driver is available as a module. To load the bonding driver you can do the following:
$ sudo modprobe bonding
$ sudo lsmod|grep bonding
bonding 59112 0
If your distribution does not have the bonding driver module available then you need to recompile your kernel with the support. Select the “Bonding Driver Support” in the “Network Device Support” section. Remember to configure the driver as a module as currently it is the only way to pass parameters to it.
Configuring the bonding driver to load automatically at boot time.
To load the bonding driver automatically at boot time:
- On RHEL 3 modify the /etc/modules.conf file to contain the following:
$ cat /etc/modules.conf
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 miimon=100 mode=1 downdelay=2000 updelay=5000
- On RHEL 4 modify the /etc/modprobe.conf file to contain the following:
$ cat /etc/modprobe.conf
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 miimon=100 mode=1 downdelay=2000 updelay=5000
- On the Debian Sarge system with the 2.6.8 kernel, I had to create the /etc/modprobe.conf file and add the following lines to it.
$ cat /etc/modprobe.conf
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 miimon=100 mode=1 downdelay=2000 updelay=5000
In debian if you install a package called modconf then there is another way to do this.
$ sudo apt-get install modconf
$ sudo /usr/sbin/modconf
modconf is ncurses based. Select the bonding driver modules from it and install it. Enter the parameters for the driver when prompted and exit from the utility. Your bonding driver is loaded with the parameters and also set to be loaded automatically next time the server reboots.
This method of using modconf basically modifies the /etc/modules file(which basically lists the modules to be loaded at boot time) to include the bonding driver name and creates a file by the driver name in /etc/modprobe.d/ to contain the parameters for the drivers. Here are the two files on my system:
$ cat /etc/modules
bonding
$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/bonding
options bonding mode=1 miimon=100 updelay=2000 downdelay=3000
Userspace Tools
You need the ifenslave utility also in addition to the bonding driver in the kernel. For Debian Sarge you can install the metapackage ifenslave. This currently points to the ifenslave-2.4 package. Since the Sarge has 2.4 kernel as the default if you just install ifenslave metapackage then ifenslave-2.4 will be installed. If you have installed the 2.6 kernel instead of the default 2.4 kernel then you should install ifenslave-2.6 package.
$ uname -a
Linux noddy 2.6.8-2-386 #1 Thu May 19 17:40:50 JST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
$ sudo apt-get install ifenslave-2.6
Configuring the system
Once the bonding driver has been loaded with the required parameter, the system needs to be configured to use the bonding driver.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (all versions) and FedoraCreate a file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 with the following contents:
DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=172.16.100.3
NETMASK=255.255.0.0
NETWORK=172.16.0.0
BROADCAST=172.16.255.255
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=no
TYPE=Ethernet
GATEWAY=172.16.200.254
Modify the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to contain the following:
DEVICE=eth0
USERCTL=no
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
TYPE=Ethernet
For other NICs in the system which you want to bond together with eth0 do the same and replace eth0 with the respective NIC like eth1, eth2 and so on.
Restart the networking:
$ sudo /sbin/service network restart
- Debian and DerivativesOn Debian systems edit the /etc/network/interfaces file and remove the reference of all the NICs and just leave the loopback adapter details. Then add the following interface details:
# The bonding interface
auto bond0
iface bond0
inet static
address 172.16.202.2
netmask 255.255.0.0
gateway 172.16.200.254
up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1
After that a simple restart of networking services will bring the bonding interface up.
$ sudo invoke-rc.d networking restart
ifconfig will list all the interfaces along with the bond0 interface. All will have the same MAC address and same ip address.
Like this:
Like Loading...
I downloaded the four CDs 
of Soalris Express Community Edition 27 and as I was installing it I realised that this is exactly Soalris 10 (with minor differences, ofcourse) and at some point during the installation I found that this is actually internally being treated as Solaris 11 (SunOS 5.11) by Sun. Overall I found that although still under development OpenSolaris to be quite impressive and with a bright future.