Red Hat Knowledgebase

Limitation: This article only applies to Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3.

Channel bonding requires each cluster member to have two Ethernet devices installed. When it is loaded, the bonding module uses the MAC address of the first enslaved network device and assigns that MAC address to the other network device if the first device fails link detection.

To configure two network devices for channel bonding, perform the following:

• Create a bonding devices in the /etc/modules.conf file. For example:

   alias bond0 bonding  
    options bonding miimon=100 mode=1 

  This loads the bonding device with the bond0 interface name, as well as passes options to the bonding driver to configure it as an active- backup master device for the enslaved network interfaces.

• Edit the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX configuration file for both eth0 and eth1 so that the files show identical contents. For example:

   
    DEVICE=ethX 
    USERCTL=no 
    ONBOOT=yes 
    MASTER=bond0 
    SLAVE=yes  
    BOOTPROTO=none 
  

  This will enslave ethX (replace X with the assigned number of the Ethernet devices) to the bond0 master device.

• Create a network script for the bonding device (for example, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0) , which would appear like the following example:
  
  

   
    DEVICE=bond0
    USERCTL=no 
    ONBOOT=yes
    BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
    NETWORK=192.168.1.0
    NETMASK=255.255.255.0 
  
    GATEWAY=192.168.1.1 
  
    IPADDR=192.168.1.104.  

• Reboot the system for the changes to take effect. Alternatively, manually load the bonding device and restart the network. For example:

   /sbin/insmod /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/bonding/bonding.o miimon=100 mode=1 
    /sbin/service network restart