NIC Teamin/bonding for RHEL 4 w/ A9900A

[Darrin St. Amant]

Wanting to see if bonding is supported in RHEL 4x with this adapter A9900A which is dual port 1Gb Intel 82546GB and the driver is the e1000 driver.

[Ivan Ferreira]

As bonding is another module of the kernel independent of the adapter module, that should work with any network adapter that supports ethtool/mii-tool.

[Darrin St. Amant]

thats what I thought.... however we're getting the eth0/eth1 to show online... but when we create bond0 its shows offline by mii-tool, can't ping, etc... any ideas we can check

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

mii-tool often shows bad results.

If bonding is configured in modprobe.conf then all you need to do is change the ifcfg-eth0 and eth1 files to make the slaves of bond0.

Then its service restart network and life is good.

SEP

[Darrin St. Amant]

yepper I've had issues with this tool to reporting bad port linkage, and would dismiss this, but I can't ping it, which of course means the bond devise is down...

[rick jones]

eth0 and eth1 aren't ifconfig'd with an IP when you try to add them to the bond are they?

I've don't some limited netperf experimentation with bonding of A9900A's in an Integrity, and while it was a while ago, I seem to recall that was one problem I ran into - I'm reasonably certain you cannot have IP's assigned to the interfaces before you try to add them to the aggregate.

[Van den Broeck Tijl]

Which bonding mode are you using? Mode 1 should work fine in (almost) any case. Please paste a copy of your ifconfig output and the ifcfg's.

I've seen issues with bonding & ARP broadcasts failing (more particularly in combination with Xen) but the solution there was static arp entry for the gateway (nasty, I know).