NIC card bonding

[gounix]

hi all,

i have downloaded the instructions from Novell on how to bond 2 or more nic cards together and it appears to be pretty straight forward.

my system current is a dell poweredge with 2 builtin nics and 2 add on nics.

i am running suse enterprise server 10 sp2

what i would like to do is to bond the 2 builtin nics as bond0 in failover mode and then bond the 2 add on nics as bond1 in failover mode.

i was wondering if it is possible to then bond together bond0 and bond1 as bond2 in a load balancing mode.

also, i need to know how to add the bonded nics to my rounting table. do i just add them using the names bond0 and bond1 as the device names instead of eth1 or eth2?

tia
rick

[Touchtecservers]

So you are putting 4 network cards into one machine, for failover and load balancing of itself?

[HROAdmin26]

i was wondering if it is possible to then bond together bond0 and bond1 as bond2 in a load balancing mode

No, because there is a master/slave relationship between the bond interface and the NIC's. The bond cannot be both master and slave at the same time (or possibly a bond interface cannot be a slave at all.) You may want to consider a bond that includes all 4 interfaces.

There are many docs on this topic.

 In the example below, the bond0 interface is the master (MASTER) while eth0 and eth1 are slaves (SLAVE). Notice all slaves of bond0 have the same MAC address (HWaddr) as bond0 for all modes except TLB and ALB that require a unique MAC address for each slave.

# /sbin/ifconfig

bond0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:C0:F0:1F:37:B4
          inet addr:XXX.XXX.XXX.YYY  Bcast:XXX.XXX.XXX.255  Mask:255.255.252.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:7224794 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:3286647 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:1 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:C0:F0:1F:37:B4
          inet addr:XXX.XXX.XXX.YYY  Bcast:XXX.XXX.XXX.255  Mask:255.255.252.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:3573025 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1643167 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:1 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0x1080

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:C0:F0:1F:37:B4
          inet addr:XXX.XXX.XXX.YYY  Bcast:XXX.XXX.XXX.255  Mask:255.255.252.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:3651769 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1643480 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          Interrupt:9 Base address:0x1400

i need to know how to add the bonded nics to my rounting table

From same link above, it has example routing table along with do's and don'ts:

Kernel IP routing table

Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
10.0.0.0 0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U        40 0          0 eth0
10.0.0.0 0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U        40 0          0 eth1
10.0.0.0 0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U        40 0          0 bond0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0         255.0.0.0       U        40 0          0 lo

* Above is a DON'T since you wouldn't want routing based on the slave interfaces in the routing table at all if you can avoid it.

[gounix]

thanks a lot for the reply. the link helped.