Red Hat Knowledgebase

This error message is due to the fact that the mode selected provides some sort of fault tolerance. The two methods to check for a lost connection are either to use the miitool/ethtool to check the link status or to regularly look for ARP responses from specified addresses.

The miimon option can be set telling the bonding interface how often to check the physical link as reported by the device driver and to fail over if the link is not found. This is good for detecting cable cuts, accidental unplugs or power loss. It will not detect a failure when the switch or connected network device continues to give a link but is not transmitting or receiving frames.

The arp_interval and arp_ip_target option is used to specify one of more IP addresses which will be regularly checked for ARP responses. When an interface does not get an ARP response for a certain period of time the interface is deemed unusable. This requires that the ARP responses from the machines configured are actually distributed over all of the interfaces in the bond. This could take some careful planning of target IP addresses in certain situations such as using an XOR type interface selection on the network side.

Note: The miimon and arp_interval/arp_ip_target options cannot both be used at the same time.