English
Sat, 16/10/2004 - 22:42

HOWTO Setup Bonding Ethernet on Debian with a 2.6 kernel 

This article was first written in October 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/179).
To use Bonding Ethernet for High-Availability (failover) on Debian (Sarge or Sid with a 2.6.x kernel [1]) you need to:
  • install package ifenslave-2.6 [2]
  • make sure the real NICs kernel modules are loaded automatically
  • edit /etc/network/interfaces to look like this:
iface bond0 inet static
        address 10.31.1.5
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 10.31.1.0
        gateway 10.31.1.254
        up /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
        down /sbin/ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1
  • comment or borrow the lines referring to your real NICs in the same file
  • add the following lines to your /etc/modprobe.d/arch/i386:
alias bond0 bonding
options bonding mode=1 miimon=100 downdelay=200 updelay=200
[1] see HOWTO Setup Bonding Ethernet on Debian with a 2.4 kernel for 2.4.x kernels [2] at least version 1.1.0-4 of the package, otherwise be careful ifenslave is in /usr/sbin, not /sbin