I am trying to connect two RHEL4 servers using 3 gige connections. I have the follwing configuration going currently:

modprobe.conf:

alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100

ifcfg-bond0:

DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=192.168.2.10
NETWORK=192.168.2.0
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
.
.
.

ifcfg-eth1-3:

DEVICE=eth(n)
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
.
.
.

The connection comes up fine and successfully transmits over all 3 links in a round-robin fashion. That said, when I connect the machines using a Dell 2724 switch, either with or without Link Aggregation Groups configured, I get balanced transmissions but all packets flow across a single link on the receive side. When I directly connect the two machines I can get the link to setup correctly but only 1 in three packets (as tested using ping) makes it across the link. Or, more correctly, only 1 in three replies make it back across the link. I'm assuming only 1 in three is arriving but that may be a bad assumption on my part.

Is what I'm seeing the expected behavior for this configuration or am I doing something incorrectly? I'd like to have both transmit and receive balanced across all three links.

Thanks in advance for any help.

sps

You might want to look at mode 6 rather than mode 0. That should eliminate the problem with the switch.

I'd like to be able to distribute traffic from a single session across all the links. As I understand it mode 6 support distributing multiple sessions across the links but not distributing a single session across multiple links. Also, I'm seeing the same issue with cables directly connected between the machines so I'm thinking the problem isn't in the switch.