Bonding, one slave always down and does not come up
 

Hello,

I am using RHEL 6.5 and trying to setup a bond interface with interface eth0 and eth2.

Here are the network-scripts

ifcg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
HWADDR=00:E0:ED:21:46:B0
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
ONBOOT=no
TYPE=Ethernet

ifcfg-eth2

DEVICE=eth2
HWADDR=00:E0:ED:2D:20:62
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=no
TYPE=Ethernet

ifcfg-bond0
DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=192.168.10.10
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.10.0
BROADCAST=192.168.10.255
BOOTPROTO=none
Type=Ethernet
ONBOOT=yes
BONDING_OPTS='miimon=100 mode=1'
~
Bonding status


/proc/net/bonding/bond0
Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.6.0 (September 26, 2009)

Bonding Mode: fault-tolerance (active-backup)
Primary Slave: None
Currently Active Slave: eth2
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 100
Up Delay (ms): 0
Down Delay (ms): 0

Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: down
Speed: Unknown
Duplex: Unknown
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:e0:ed:21:46:b0
Slave queue ID: 0

Slave Interface: eth2
MII Status: up
Speed: 1000 Mbps
Duplex: full
Link Failure Count: 3
Permanent HW addr: 00:e0:ed:2d:20:62
Slave queue ID: 0

this is in bonding.conf
cat /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf
alias bond0 bonding

This is in dmesg
Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.6.0 (September 26, 2009)
bonding: bond0: Setting MII monitoring interval to 100.
bonding: bond0: setting mode to active-backup (1).
bonding: bond0: Setting MII monitoring interval to 100.
bonding: bond0: setting mode to active-backup (1).
bonding: bond0: Setting MII monitoring interval to 100.
bonding: bond0: setting mode to active-backup (1).
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): bond0: link is not ready
8021q: adding VLAN 0 to HW filter on device bond0
bonding: bond0: Setting MII monitoring interval to 100.
bonding: bond0: setting mode to active-backup (1).
bonding: bond0: Adding slave eth0.
8021q: adding VLAN 0 to HW filter on device eth0
(null): Dropping TSO features since no CSUM feature.
(null): Dropping TSO6 features since no CSUM feature.
bonding: bond0: enslaving eth0 as a backup interface with a down link.
bonding: bond0: Adding slave eth2.
8021q: adding VLAN 0 to HW filter on device eth2
(null): Dropping TSO features since no CSUM feature.
(null): Dropping TSO6 features since no CSUM feature.
bonding: bond0: enslaving eth2 as a backup interface with a down link.
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): bond0: link is not ready
8021q: adding VLAN 0 to HW filter on device bond0
igb: eth2 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX/TX
ixgbe 0000:04:00.0: registered PHC device on eth6


Any reason why eth0 can not come up?

Pull the cable on the nic that is running, the other nic should come up automatically.
This is what the config looks like similar to raid 1. one drive fails the other mirrored
pops into play.

Is this what you want it to do, or do you want both to work at sametime?

A few shots in the dark:

Is NetworkManager running? If yes it can interfere in unpredictable ways, since you didn't specify NM_CONTROLLED=no in the ifcfg files.

Also, what happens when you set eth0 up manually? You could try three methods:
service network restart
ifup eth0
ip link set dev eth0 up

I tried your configuration in a virtual machine, and my result is different - both interfaces are up. However, I am a bit surprised to see ONBOOT=no in your config files. It might not matter, but /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.6.32/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt sets ONBOOT to yes.

Network Manager doesn't cause things to act unpredictably, network Manager flat out does not work with bonds in RHEL 6.5. RHEL 7 is another story.

So put the nm_controlled=no key in all 3 files, stop network Manager, chkconfig it off, as well. Then run service network restart, but you may need to reboot it to get thing working right again.

Here's the bonding guide for RHEL 6.5 and under: https://access.redhat.com/articles/172483