MyGeekProject

I had problems with trying to get two independent NIC on the same network so I thought I would use bonding and it seems to work well. Here are the instructions for setting it up on Ubuntu 8.10, yes I know reverting back to 8.10 after so much invested in 9.04. I think the problem here is that 9.04 changed so much with the network that it has become a bit more tricky to get things working. This should work fine with 9.04 but I know 8.10 is stable with ServerOS and it should make a better NAS box for me. Anyways here are the instructions:

Install the bonding enslave programs

apt-get install ifenslave

Shutdown any active network interfaces you intend to use with bonding

sudo -s
ifdown eth0
ifdown eth1

Comment out the ethernet configurations from /etc/network/interfaces

#auto eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp

Add in the bonding configuration into /etc/network/interfaces

auto bond0
iface bond0 inet dhcp
     slaves all
     bond-mode 4
     bond-miimon 100

Bring up the interface

sudo ifup bond0

Bonding modes:
mode=0 (balance-rr) Round-robin policy: Transmit packets in sequential order from the first available slave through the last. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

mode=1 (active-backup) Active-backup policy: Only one slave in the bond is active. A different slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The bond’s MAC address is externally visible on only one port (network adapter) to avoid confusing the switch. This mode provides fault tolerance. The primary option affects the behavior of this mode.

mode=2 (balance-xor) XOR policy: Transmit based on [(source MAC address XOR'd with destination MAC address) modulo slave count]. This selects the same slave for each destination MAC address. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

mode=3 (broadcast) Broadcast policy: transmits everything on all slave interfaces. This mode provides fault tolerance.

mode=4 (802.3ad) IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Creates aggregation groups that share the same speed and duplex settings. Utilizes all slaves in the active aggregator according to the 802.3ad specification.

Pre-requisites: Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving the speed and duplex of each slave.
A switch that supports IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Most switches will require some type of configuration to enable 802.3ad mode.

mode=5 (balance-tlb) Adaptive transmit load balancing: channel bonding that does not require any special switch support. The outgoing traffic is distributed according to the current load (computed relative to the speed) on each slave. Incoming traffic is received by the current slave. If the receiving slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address of the failed receiving slave.

Pre-requisite: Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving the speed of each slave.
mode=6 (balance-alb) Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation. The bonding driver intercepts the ARP Replies sent by the local system on their way out and overwrites the source hardware address with the unique hardware address of one of the slaves in the bond such that different peers use different hardware addresses for the server.

Testing results – I ran a simple ping from another machine and then while running unplugged each NIC and plugged it in while leaving at least (1) NIC attached rotating through all of the NIC which proves it switched between them and ping never stopped. Then I felt brave and used a FTP client and transferred a 12GB file from a laptop to the server doing the same rotating of pulling NIC wires. All worked flawlessly. I also rebooted and checked it again running through everything to make sure it kept the settings.

Check this site out for more information: http://blog.brightbox.co.uk/posts/howto-do-ethernet-bonding-on-ubuntu-properly

UPDATED: I got a script for the Cisco Switches to get this working

enable
configure terminal
interface <intf name> <intf number>
channel-group <group number> mode active
no shut
interface port-channel <group number>
no shut
end
write

Found a couple of useful command for trouble shooting networking problems on Ubuntu I thought I would share.

show all network adaptors

lshw -C network

show all network configurations

ifconfig -a

Turn ON or OFF the network adaptor

ifconfig eth1 up
ifconfig eth1 down

So recently I have a VMware image go down and needed to move it to another machine. I had problems with the NIC when it was moved. Here I what I did.

In terminal under root I typed

dmesg | grep eth0

You will probably get an error that the eth0 was changed. Take the new name for the eth0 and edit the..

nano /etc/networking/interfaces

I changed the 0 to 1 and then rebooted the machine and everything seemed to work fine.

Other command that I did where

modprobe e1000

or

modprobe pcnet32