Nic bonding is defined as bonding of two or more network cards on a server/pc to form a parallel single connection. This is a great way of achieving redundancy to a server if it's having more number of network cards. Its having many names like.

	

	1. Link aggregation

	2. Channel Bonding

	3. NIC Bonding

	4. NIC teaming

	5. Network card Bonding

	6. Ethernet bonding

	7. Trunking

	8. Etherchannel

	9. Multi-link truning(MLT)

	10.Network bonding

	11.Network Fault Tolerance(NFT)

	12.Port channel

	13.Smartgroup

	14.EtherTrunk

 

	Nic bonding is used to provide two benefit's for us

	

	1. High bandwidth

	2. Redundancy/resilience

	

	Before Clustering softwares come in to existing this technique is widely used to provide redundancy to a high end server. After cluster software introduced it's used to enhance the cluster redundancy.

	

	In this post we will see how can we achieve Nic bonding.

	Nic bonding will work with the help of bonding driver in kernel.

 

 

	 

 

 

	Implementing NIC bonding : Participating interfaces.

 

 

	eth0

	

	eth1

	

	bnd0

	

	Step1 : Create bond interface file with following content in it

	

	vi /etc/syconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bnd0

	

	DEVICE=bnd0

	

	IPADDR=192.168.0.234

	

	NETWORK=192.168.0.0

	

	NETMASK=255.255.255.0

 

 

	USERCTL=no

	

	BOOTPROTO=none

	

	ONBOOT=yes

	

	GATEWAY=192.168.0.1

	

	save and exit the file

	

	Step2 : Now create a bnd0 virtual interface in modprobe.conf as shown below

	

	alias bnd0 bonding

	

	options bnd0 miimon=100 mode=6

	

	Save and exit the file

	

	Let me explain what actually the above two lines indicates

	

	Line1 : (alias bnd0 bonding) to load the bonding module in to kernel

	

	Line2 : Indicate the option for thie bond interface

	

	miimon is nothing but to MONitor with MIItool to check the availability of other interfaces.

	

	mode is to specify whether the bond is configured as load balancing or fail over. Here it's load-balancing which means data transmission will be shared between two interfaces. To know more about modes click here

	

	Step3 : Load the module in to kernel with modprob command to update this changes to kernel

	

	#modprob bonding

	

	Step4 : edit interface card details of both physical devices

	

	For eth0

	

	vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

	

	DEVICE=eth0

	

	USERCTL=no

	

	ONBOOT=yes

	

	MASTER=bnd0

	

	SLAVE=yes

	

	BOOTPROTO=none

	

	For eth1

	

	vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1

	

	DEVICE=eth1

	

	USERCTL=no

	

	ONBOOT=yes

	

	MASTER=bnd0

	

	SLAVE=yes

	

	BOOTPROTO=none

	

	Save and exit the files

	

	The above thing is self explanatory for many admins but let me explain to new people.

	

	DEVICE Indicates what is the device name

	

	USERCTL Indicates that can user control this device(here it's no)

	

	ONBOOT Indicates that at the boot time do this device should be up?

	

	MASTER Is this device has master? Then what it is(here it's bnd0)

	

	SLAVE Is this device acting as slave?

	

	BOOTPROTO What about getting ip add from what protocol?(it's set to none which indicate it's a static IP)

	

	Step5 : Restart the network service and see the output of ifconfig for your self.

	

	#service network restart

	

	#ifconfig

	

	Questions & Answers

	

	1. How can we say my data is flowing in which path?

	

	Ans : Link aggregation(bonding driver) will take care of sending all the frames of particular session in same path. This is called as ordering of frames.

	

	2. Can we bond more than 2 NIC?

	

	Ans : Yes we can, follow the same procedure. In fact there is no limit but linux server do have limit to have total number of NIC cards.

	

	Tips on implementing NIC bonding

	

	1. Enable spanning tree for switches, without which network speed reduces.

	

	2. Be careful if you’re doing this over a remote ssh.

 

Please visit https://www.linuxnix.com for more linux admin stuff

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Surendra Anne

Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.

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