Red Hat 3.0 NIC bonding

[Sandeep Sanjao Figer]

Hi,

I have HP DL 380 G4 with Red Hat AS 3.0. I am having trouble enabling bonding on my eth0 & eth1. I tried to play around with various options in modules.conf, ifcfg-eth0, ifcfg-eth1, bond0 etc but no luck. Have to manually up the eth1 interface which gives error anyway. Would appreciate some help on the same.

Regards,
Sandy

[Chakravarthi]

were u able to load the driver modle? can you give the error message

[Sandeep Sanjao Figer]

Hi,
I can load the driver but it doesn't seem to be working when the system is up. In the Network panel, it shows inactive.
Regards,
Sandeep

[Gallig Renaud · Accepted solution]

Hi,

What do you mean by: "Have to manually up the eth1 interface which gives error anyway" ?

Setting up bonding is usually pretty easy on RedHat. Your configurations files should be as follow (do not remove lines in /etc/modules.conf, only add and change the ones that are different):

/etc/modules.conf
alias eth0 bcm5700
alias eth1 bcm5700
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 miimon=100 mode=0

(if you did not install Proliant Support Pack, bcm5700 drivers may not be there. The best solution will be to install it. If for some reasons, you do not want to install it, use tg3 drivers instead: alias ethX tg3)
(You can change options as well: mode 0 is Load balancing Server to Switch only, ALB)

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX
DEVICE=ethX
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
SLAVE=yes
MASTER=bond0
USERCTL=no

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0
DEVICE=bond0
BOOTPROTO=static
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=
NETMASK=

Then restart your network service and everything should be fine.
Hope this help.

[Gopi Sekar]

if eth1 is inactive when system boots up then may be ONBOOT flag is not enabled for it.

edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 and set ONBOOT=yes

reboot the system and eth1 should be enabled automatically.

[melvyn burnard]

Perhaps this manual may help you:

http://docs.hp.com/en/B9903-90043/B9903-90043.pdf

refer to page 149 as a starting point

[Sandeep Sanjao Figer]

Hi,

Tried initially with Gallig Renaud's suggestion. Both the NIC's do up come normally & bond0 shows okay while boot. Somehow I was not able to ping any other machine. Did deactive & active again & it was fine. Did a normal reboot again & it seems to be ok. I see lot of other entries as per the word attachement from the zip file in Network Graphics panel. Not a very Linux expert & so just not sure why all those backup files I had made like ifcfg-eth0_may9 & so on also get loaded. They are present in different locations as well. I had just modified files as per Gallig Renaud's suggestion
I have attached the files for the reference.


Regards,
Sandeep

[Gopi Sekar]

in the second image you have showed a graphics containg ftp transaction. i dont know is it ftp to local system or you are ftp-ing to remote system?

few things to check for:

check any firewall is blocking your traffic. run /etc/init.d/iptables stop and run ping command, see whether it works.

if still not working, time to check for individual ethernet cards. remove the bonding (i know its pain), connect ethernet cards individually(with separate ip) and see whether it pings to any destination machine.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[Steven E. Protter]

An additon to the start section of /etc/init.d/network

start)
/sbin/modprobe bonding mode=1 miimon=100


You need to monitor the connection for it to work right.

I have this working though bond0 shows incorrect speed, I'm getting Gigabit throughput with Intel NIC cards and ES 4.0

SEP

[Sandeep Sanjao Figer]

Gopi,

As said in my last email, bonding is working ok now but just not sure why there are multiple entries in Network option for configuration files. Ignore the FTP scree as it was another job I was doing..

Just wanted to ensure that correct ifcfg-eth0, ifcfg-eth1 & bond0 were getting loaded.

Regards,
Sandep