linux bonding modes and procurve switches

[Stephan Hendl]

Hi all,

I want to change the active-backup mode (mode=1) of my linux bonding device connected to a hp procurve switch to a method including load-balancing. What bonding-mode is preferred and what have I to configure at the procurve-side? The interfaces eth0 as well as eth1 are working with 1000MB/FD.

Thanks and regards,
Stephan

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Sephan,

This will not work with all NIC cards. I've tried to go active-active with HP DL class servers and the broadcom built in NIC cards. No matter what I did with the configuration it would not go active at boot time active-active. Network switch configuration was standard and Intel NIC bonding worked active-active.

So as you see success depends on the driver and type of NIC card.

For further assistance please post your /etc/modprobe.conf configuration. Also the ifcfg configuration you plan to use for the bonding.

Diagnostics with mii-tool and ethtool ??

If possible at all, active active should not require special configuration on the HP procurve switch, since both ports now provide 1000 BaseT speeds.

SEP

[Stephan Hendl]

Thanks for answering! Here is my /etc/modprobe.conf:

alias eth0 tg3
alias eth1 tg3
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 miimon=100 mode=1
alias scsi_hostadapter cciss
alias scsi_hostadapter1 qla2xxx_conf
alias scsi_hostadapter2 qla2xxx
alias net-pf-10 off
alias ipv6 off
options qla2xxx qlport_down_retry=5 ql2xfailover=0
remove qla2xxx /sbin/modprobe -r --first-time --ignore-remove qla2xxx && { /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove qla2xxx_conf; }

and here the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0:

# bonding interface
DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=10.142.224.19
NETMASK=255.255.254.0
NETWORK=10.142.224.0
BROADCAST=10.142.225.255
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
USERCTL=no

The NICs are in fact that from Broadcom. Would it be helpful to use the HP driver (NIC as well as bonding) rather than the driver provided by the standard redhat kernel?