ethernet bonding in Redhat AS 4 64bit

[Gregory D Hough]

Neil Watson wrote:
> I've been attempting to bond two NICs together in an active-passive
> mode.  I cannot do this reliably.  When I do get it working and run
> "service network restart" without error, connectivity is permanently
> dropped.  I think is has something to do with how the bonding module is
> loaded.  I've duplicated this behaviour on two separate servers.
> 
> modprobe.conf lines:
> alias bond0 bonding
> options bond0 miimon=100 mode=1
> 
> ifcfg-bond0:
> DEVICE=bond0
> USERCTL=no
> ONBOOT=yes
> BROADCAST=176.16.1.255
> NETWORK=172.16.1.0
> NETMASK=255.255.255.0
> GATEWAY=172.16.1.1
> IPADDR=172.16.1.203
> 
> ifcfg-eth0:
> DEVICE=eth0
> USERCTL=no
> ONBOOT=yes
> MASTER=bond0
> SLAVE=yes
> BOOTPROTO=none
> ETHTOOL_OPTS="duplex full autoneg off"
> 
> ifcfg-eth1:
> DEVICE=eth1
> USERCTL=no
> ONBOOT=yes
> MASTER=bond0
> SLAVE=yes
> BOOTPROTO=none
> ETHTOOL_OPTS="duplex full autoneg off"
> 
Maybe don't use "service network restart" if you can bring it all up 
manually. Something must be amiss in the start-up scripts. And who cares 
if it don't come up ONBOOT when uptime is measured in years.

Are they identical nics using the same driver? Are they using the same 
interrupt? I don't have any answers, but I am interested in why you're 
attempting to do this. Are you trying to create something like a full 
duplex port aggregator tap? Wouldn't you need to bond three nics 
together for that? Or is this just to passively monitor the fused nic box?

The reason I'm curious is because I searched for something like this, 
and the closest I came to it was an iTap from Net Optics. But with a 
sticker of 4k each, they're quite out of my reach.

Good Luck,
greg
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