Network Configuration SLES11

[dsmith1984uk]

Hello me again.
So I've got a Dell Poweredge R410 with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 installed and my boss wants me to configure it like this:

Eth0 - No IP address (on general tab, activation set to "never")
Eth1 - No IP address (on general tab, activation set to "never")
Eth2 - No IP address (on general tab, activation set to "never")
Eth3 - No IP address (on general tab, activation set to "never")

bond0 - eth0, eth1, eth2, eth3 selected (Activation set to "On boot") No IP Address

bridge0 - bond0 selected (Activation set to "On boot"). IP, subnet and hostname defined.

The DNS and routing has all been set correctly.

The problem is when I set the network configuration as above I cannot connect to the network I'm unable to ping the gateway.
I only have 1 cable connected and it's plugged into eth0 but apparently this doesn't matter.

If I delete the bond and bridge and instead apply the settings to eth0 it connects no problem but my boss wants to use load balancing and states that that setup should work.

Any idea's???

Many thanks in advance.

[D-cat]

This is beyond me, but it seems to me that you should be setting up as a LVS router with load balance. I would think that bonding the interfaces would defeat the purpose and confuse the real servers... but I've never tried it so I wouldn't really know.

All I could suggest is pointing to the Linux standard documentation on the subject. Good luck, and hopefully you run into someone who knows better than I.

LVS-HOWTO homepage

--Edit--
I made the assumption based on the words "Load Balancing" that each port goes to a different server. If this is not the case, the trick might work, but I doubt for your boss's intended purpose.

[HROAdmin26]

A bridge connects 2 networks - I don't know why you would have a bridge configured. Bonding the NIC's will combine the bandwidth, which you have already done. The bonding mode available will depend on whether the *switch* knows these ports are being combined. This is all covered in the Linux bonding docs.

Talk to your boss about his goals and why/how this "should work."

[a9503128]

Hi

It sounds like you have traffic going walkie's at the switch level, check your switch supports 802.3ad Link Aggregation and that you have the hardware address "HWaddr" of each NIC in the ifcfg-eth0,1,2 and 3 files.

Resources - A really good clear article if you search backdrift + linux bonding


Thanks


Alex

[dsmith1984uk]

Now it has got very strange.
From the host machine configured as I stated at the start of the thread I am unable to ping the gateway I'm also unable to connect to the machine using UltraVNC.
However I have 4 Windows 2008 Virtual machines on this host and they are quite happy to communicate with the network. I can also remote into them using Remote Desktop Manager.

Any idea's? How can the guests talk to the network and the host can't!?!?

[dsmith1984uk]

A bridge connects 2 networks - I don't know why you would have a bridge configured. Bonding the NIC's will combine the bandwidth, which you have already done. The bonding mode available will depend on whether the *switch* knows these ports are being combined. This is all covered in the Linux bonding docs.

Talk to your boss about his goals and why/how this "should work."

The machine is running 4 virtuals which will not even boot if there is not a bridge present. Strangly as I said above the virtuals can talk to the network its just this Linux host which doesn't wanna play ball.

[dsmith1984uk]

Now with that same configuration as stated in the first post I can now connect to the Linux host, however I cannot connect to the 4 WinServer2008 machines.

On top of that the 4 virtuals can ping the gateway and any other machine on the network but I cannot ping them no matter which machine I attempt it from.

The firewall is disabled on Linux host and the 4 guest server machines.
But when I load the firewall interface from Yast2 i get this message:

"Another kind of firewall is active in your system. If you continue, SUSEfirewall2 may produce undefined errors. It would be better to remove the other firewall before configuring SUSefirewall2."

[dsmith1984uk]

Problem has been solved.

Turns out it was because we had the bond driver options set to "mode=balance-alb miimon=100", we wanted it this way to make it easier for us to install but it doesn't seem to like it.
Now we are going to have to configure the switch we plug it into but hey atleast it works now.

We currently have it set to "mode=active-backup miimon=100".