Hi,

I am running fedora purely as a webserver which gets very busy. I was wondering how easy it was to setup load balancing between the 2 NIC's i have installed would be. Would i need to start rebuilding the kernel or would it be a more simple job?

Any advice would be much apricated.

Thanks, Ben.

We did "bonding" on our setup on Redhat AS 3:

In /etc/modules.conf added:
alias bond0 bonding
options bonding miimon=100


In /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts:

1) Created ifcfg_bond0 with the following contents:
# Bonding Device for eth2 and eth3
DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=172.16.0.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=172.16.0.0
BROADCAST=172.16.0.255
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
USRCTL=no

2) Modified ifcfg_eth2 and ifcfg_eth3.
# Intel Corp.|82546EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper)
DEVICE=eth2
HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
USERCTL=no
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
ETHTOOL_OPTS="autoneg off speed 100 duplex full"

Note that in item 2 the HWADDR would be your MAC so would be different for each card. The "ETHTOOL_OPTS" is something I added to turn off autonegotiation and hard set the speed to 100 and full duplex. (See man ethtool for more on what it does.) You don't have to have those options for the bonding.

Also if you only have 2 NICs you'd likely want to do eth0 and eth1 instead of eth2 and eth3.

Once done do service network restart.