bonding ethernet

This article was first written in February 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/325).

This technology is meant to merge several network links into one logical, providing with higher availability and higher throughput (while it is not absolutely necessary to use both aspects at the same time). Some vendors call it Trunking (ex.: Sun) or Link Aggregation. It's all the same technology, and they communicate together rather well.

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 s

This article was first written in July 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/142).

To use Bonding Ethernet for High-Availability (fail-over) on Debian (Woody, Sarge or Sid with a 2.4.x kernel) you need to:

• install package ifenslave-2.4
• 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