Since one of the requirements for my current project is having NIC redundancy, I didn’t get around looking at the available “adapter teaming” (or adapter bonding) solutions available for Linux/SLES.
First I tried to dig into the Broadcom solution (since the Blade I first implemented the stuff uses a Broadcom NetXtreme II card) , but found out pretty soon that the basp configuration tool, which is *only* available on the Broadcom driver CD’s shipped with the Blade itself, pretty much doesn’t work.
Some hours googling later at how to get the frickin’ Broadcom crap working, I stumbled upon a file linked as bonding.txt. Turns out, that the kernel already supports adapter teaming (only that it’s called adapter bonding) by itself. No need for the Broadcom solution anymore.
Setting it up was rather easy (besides my lazy SUSE admin can’t do it via yast; it has to be done on the file layer since “yast lan” is too stupid to even show the thing), it’s simply creating the interface configs via said “yast lan“, copying one of the “ifcfg-eth-id” files to another file called “ifcfg-bond0“, removing some stuff out of it and cleaning out the other interface configs.
Then simply shove in the following into the ifcfg-bond0 in /etc/sysconfig/network:
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IPADDR="141.53.5.141" NETMASK="255.255.255.0" NETWORK="141.53.5.0" MTU="" REMOTE_IPADDR="" STARTMODE="auto" BONDING_MASTER="yes" BONDING_MODULE_OPTS="miimon=100 mode=balance-alb" BONDING_SLAVE0="bus-pci-0000:02:00.0" BONDING_SLAVE1="bus-pci-0000:06:00.0" IPADDR_int="172.16.234.41" NETMASK_int="255.255.255.0" NETWORK_int="172.16.234.0" LABEL_int="int" |
That’s it .. We just defined an adapter IP (the 141.53.5.x) and an virtual interface labeled as “int“. We also configured the MII-Monitor to check every 100ms(?) the link of each interface (those defined in BONDING_SLAVEx) if they are either up or down, as well as the adaptive load balancing (“mode=balance-alb“).
Only thing annoying me with that solution is the following entry in /var/log/messages:
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Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.0.1 (January 9, 2006) Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bonding: Warning: either miimon or arp_interval and arp_ip_target module parameters must be specified, otherwise bonding will not detect link failures! see bonding.txt for details. Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bonding: bond0: Setting MII monitoring interval to 100. Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bonding: bond0: setting mode to balance-alb (6). Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bnx2: eth1: using MSI Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bonding: bond0: enslaving eth1 as an active interface with a down link. Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bnx2: eth1 NIC Link is Up, 1000 Mbps full duplex Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bonding: bond0: link status definitely up for interface eth1. Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bonding: bond0: making interface eth1 the new active one. Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bnx2: eth0: using MSI Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bonding: bond0: enslaving eth0 as an active interface with a down link. Jul 4 18:32:00 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bnx2: eth0 NIC Link is Up, 1000 Mbps full duplex Jul 4 18:32:01 dbc-mysql1 kernel: bonding: bond0: link status definitely up for interface eth0. |
See the warning ? I can’t get it to shut up .. I also tried loading the mii.ko module, but it won’t shut up … damn 🙁
Well, at least the adapter teaming works as desired (still haven’t measured the performance impact with this setup – really need a clever way to do that) and I can plug one of the two cables connected to this box and still have one interface online and a continuous connection. yay ❗
In the mean time Novell has implemented configuring bonding through yast2 in SLE10sp1.