Bridging network ports for better connectivity.. possible?

Swakoo · 01-31-2007, 04:42 AM

Hi guys,

I was thinking, is it possible to bridge 2 NIC together (both each has their public IP) such that I can 'load-balance' connections going through on the 2 NICs, and I can have some form of failover should the NIC fail.

Sounds over-done abit I think, but just wondering.

thanks!

chort · 01-31-2007, 12:27 PM

That's not bridging, it's bonding. You can either have redundency (in case of failure) or capacity (aggregated throughput), but not both, SFAIK. Very, very, very few applications would need bonding for thoughput... Pretty much the only thing that could saturate your pipe would be streaming video of very high quality, probably multicast. Is your upstream connection faster than 100Mb? If not, you would never need to aggregate your bandwidth.

Swakoo · 02-01-2007, 03:49 AM

currently both up and down is 10Mb average

just exploring options... because we initially plan the setup as such. Is there a guide to setting it up?

Swakoo · 02-07-2007, 09:56 PM

are there tools to see if the bonding works fine.. and data is being transferred on both channel?

are there tools to monitor it too?

so basically.. if i am using RHEL4, i just add entry for alias to modprobe.conf, and create new ifcfg-bond# , point both my physical surface MASTER will be bond#, and thats that yah?

I base this on RHEL3 documents... can't seem to find rhel4 ones

Swakoo · 02-08-2007, 03:56 AM

Some updates.

My server has basically 2 source of traffic:

1 end is public ip; that's where the WWW is.
1 end is private ip; that's to my dB and file server.

This server has 4 ethernet ports, and I want to try to do bonding for each pair. I have successfully created bond0 for the private end,
but I can't get bond1 (for public) to work. I keep getting the following errors:

Code:

Bringing up interface bond1:  bonding device bond1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.

There seems to be many ways of configuring, among the already very limited data i can find online, as I am using RHEL4.

You guys got any similiar situation and managed to solve it? I've read about people having problems with multiple bond interfaces. Some couldn't solve it, some did - but their solutions can't work for me.

Swakoo · 02-08-2007, 08:01 PM

anyone with similiar problems?

As of now, I have 4 ethernet interfaces:

eth0, eth1, eth2, eth3

eth2 and eth3 are bonded to bond0 (private ip) and it works fine
eth0 and eth1 is supposed to be bonded to bond1 (public) but it can't work.

eth0

Code:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
HWADDR=00:15:C5:60:70:4E
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
MASTER=bond1
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no

eth1

Code:

DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
MASTER=bond1
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no

bond1

Code:

DEVICE=bond1
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=no
NETWORK=<network address>
NETMASK=<subnet>
IPADDR=<IP ADDR>

modprobe

Code:

install bon0 /sbin/modprobe -a eth2 eth3 && /sbin/modprobe bonding
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 -0 bond0 mode=balance-rr miimon=100
alias bond1 bonding
install bond1 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install bonding -o bond1 mode=balance-alb miimon=50

For modprobe I have tried many other combination but to no avail

Swakoo · 02-08-2007, 08:42 PM

furthur updates:

I tried using max_bonds, and although restarting the service did not spew out errors, it doesn't work too. Still can't ping.

Swakoo · 02-12-2007, 12:16 AM

anyone....?

shinobi59 · 02-19-2007, 04:32 AM

I was curious why you're using bond1 instead of bond0. Multiple bond interfaces are only supported in RHEL4 Update 2 and later. What update of RHEL4 are you using?

Swakoo · 02-20-2007, 09:16 PM

ah that is interesting, i didn't know about that.

I used a mix of redhat update installation (as they were installed at different times)

is there anyway i can find out if the one i am doing bonding on is update2 and beyond?

reason why i am using bond1 is because i have 4 NIC, need to bond into 2 pairs each: bond0 and bond1

acid_kewpie · 02-21-2007, 03:29 PM

Sorry for the lack of responses to your thread, only just seen it now myself. are you still after advice here?

if you're still having the issues as above, do you actually get eth0 and eth1 visible at all in an ifconfig output? in my experience (which i admit isn't huge) you'll get both those interfaces up before the bond itself comes up. is the MAC correct for eth0? do you *need* that mac in there? could be throwing a spanner in the works, but culd be needed to force a certain device to a certain interface number. if so though, i'd be looking to enforce that on all eth interfaces, not just that one.

also you've not made any mention of /proc/net/bonding/bond1, does that exist, and tell you anythign about what's there?

i'd not heard anything about the limitations on the number of bonds on rhel 4, but then have little reason to really, sounds pretty unlikely to me though, and certainly a nasty bug if so.

Swakoo · 02-22-2007, 09:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by acid_kewpie

Sorry for the lack of responses to your thread, only just seen it now myself. are you still after advice here?

if you're still having the issues as above, do you actually get eth0 and eth1 visible at all in an ifconfig output? in my experience (which i admit isn't huge) you'll get both those interfaces up before the bond itself comes up. is the MAC correct for eth0? do you *need* that mac in there? could be throwing a spanner in the works, but culd be needed to force a certain device to a certain interface number. if so though, i'd be looking to enforce that on all eth interfaces, not just that one.

also you've not made any mention of /proc/net/bonding/bond1, does that exist, and tell you anythign about what's there?

i'd not heard anything about the limitations on the number of bonds on rhel 4, but then have little reason to really, sounds pretty unlikely to me though, and certainly a nasty bug if so.

yeah man, dying for some info from you experts here

I scour the net but not much info that is relevant. A lot of people having multiple bond interface problem, but none of the solution work.

/proc/net/bonding/bond1 doesn't exist, thus my problem. It doesn't generate it . I wonder why.

All my interfaces are working fine alone/