XW8000 linux network bonding driver

[David Reed 10]

I have installed a Redhat 8 network bonding driver for my prolian DL series servers but need a bonding driver for my XW8000 workstation. Has anyone done this? If not, could anyone point me to a good starting point?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom David,

Can you tell me a little bit about your XW8000 workstation?

Who built it, what model network card is it, things like this.

For bonding to work you need two NIC cards in the workstation.

Bonding setup, which I've do regularly is really a setup change. It works with some NIC cards it does not work with others. RH 8 is pretty old, but it should be possible to do this if the card and driver combination is compatible.

If you look at the proliant server, you will see changes to /etc/modules.conf and a bond driver sitting alongside the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 scripts.

So your starting point if bonding is even appropriate for this workstation is copying the generic part of the configuration from a working bonded system.

Regards,

SEP

[David Reed 10]

I purchased the XW8000 computers directly from HP. I have an Intel PRO/1000 MT on the motherboard and an Intel PRO/1000 XT PCI NIC. I have bonding working on a HP Proliant server so I will use that as an example to start the XW8000 configuration. My XW8000 uses the e1000 driver. Should I be using the bcm5700 driver? That's the driver I use on the server.

[Craig Gilmore]

David,

You should not use the bcm5700 driver unless the NIC on the workstation is a Broadcom NIC.

I'm presuming that you are using Red Hat 8 on the workstation. I strongly recommend using a more current version. Later versions have bonding support as part of the release.

I've built bonds with the standard e1000 driver on newer versions of Red Hat without problems.

Good Luck.