I need some clarification when it comes to NIC Bonding/Teaming. I have teamed two Broadcom NIC's eth0 & eth1 and i hope that it works fine. When i do a machine restart or network restart, i see a message telling:

"Sep 11 14:49:48 box01 kernel: bonding: Warning: the permanent HWaddr of eth0 - 00:1A:78:2F:10:56 - is still in use by bond0. Set the HWaddr of eth0 to a different address to avoid conflicts"

eth0 IP: 192.168.1.111
eth1 IP: 192.168.1.121

bond0 IP: 192.168.1.131

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 is as below:
DEVICE=eth0
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=no

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 is as below:
DEVICE=eth1
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=no

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 is as below:
DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=192.168.1.131
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
GATEWAY=192.168.1.1
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROT=none
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=no

/etc/modprobe.conf is as below:
alias eth0 bnx2
alias eth1 bnx2
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 miimon=100 max_bonds=2

/proc/net/bonding/bond0 is as below:

Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v2.6.3-rh (June 8, 2005)

Bonding Mode: fault-tolerance (active-backup)
Primary Slave: None
Currently Active Slave: eth0
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 100
Up Delay (ms): 0
Down Delay (ms): 0

Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:1a:78:2f:10:56

Slave Interface: eth1
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:1a:78:2f:10:98

/proc/net/bonding/bond1 is as below:

Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v2.6.3-rh (June 8, 2005)

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

eth0 is Active.

I'm not able to ping eth0 & eth1 after bonding which seems alright.
I'm able to ping and connect to bond0 which seems alright again.

But why that Warning which i've mentioned above popping up? If anyone has any info on this, please do let me know.

Thanks,
Dheeraj.

hi dheerajms,

well, that is normal behavior if you doing NIC bonding (not neccesarily in linux - but other such as cisco as well).
just create a fake MAC-address in ifcfg-bond0 - it will OK.

HTH.

Thanks a lot for making this clear to me rossonieri#1! I appreciate this. On my way creating a fake MAC ID.