HOWTO Setup Bonding Ethernet on Debian with a 2.4 kernel

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 bond0 eth0 up /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth1

• comment the lines referring to your real NICs in the same file
• add the following lines to your /etc/modutils/arch/i386:

alias bond0 bonding options bonding mode=1 miimon=100 downdelay=200 updelay=200

• launch update-modules

For 2.6 kernels, you might want to take a look at HOWTO Setup Bonding Ethernet on Debian with a 2.6 kernel