Boost Reliability with Ethernet Bonding and Linux - Page 2

By Carla Schroder | Aug 27, 2007
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Starting Everything At Boot

To load the module with the options you want at boot, edit /etc/modprobe.d/arch/i386 and add these lines. Ignore any documentation that tells you to use a different file because that is wrong:

alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=balance-alb miimon=100

Then enshrine your settings in /etc/network/interfaces, using your own addresses of course: 

auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.101
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.1.0
        broadcast 192.168.1.255
        gateway 192.168.1.50
        up /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
        down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1

bond0 Status

Take a look at the contents of /proc/net/bonding/bond0 to see how your new interface is faring:

$ /proc/net/bonding/bond0
Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.1.1 (September 26, 2006)

Bonding Mode: adaptive load balancing
Primary Slave: eth0
Currently Active Slave: eth1
MII Status: up
[...]

Now what? In the second part you'll learn some additional configuration options for different roles such as round-robin or failure-only, how to configure bonding on Fedora, some tips on network topology, and how to troubleshoot problems.

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