Talk:HOWTO Setup Bonded ethernet adapters
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I did this without using the /etc/conf.d/local.start and such, the baselayout provides a init script for network which supports bonding nativly, should this be edited or is this the perferred way?
Does this provide any transfer speed improvments or is it just for a backup connection?
Yes, it bonds the two connections together to make them look like one connection with twice the bandwidth. For a truly redundant connection using two switches (or a single redundant switch), you can use bridging with STP to provide automatic failover between the two connections.
-Eliot Gable
[edit] Non-module bonding
Since the article mentions testing this, I built a monolithic kernel without module loading enabled in the kernel. Using the script provided, it worked like a charm and we're using it in our production environment. The only bit I had to change was the BOND_MODE (to balance-rr) because I'm using this for binding two tapped lines together instead of failover capability and wanted to receive traffic from both lines.
-romandas
[edit] Testing monolitic script
I have used this script in combination with a 2.6.23-harded-r7 kernel and it worked like a charm. I have created a bond which has 2 links which can be used both. The other end of the cables is a 3Com SuperStack II 3300 or a 3Com SuperStack 3 3300XM (depend on what I want to use that day). I also used balance-rr. Although I changed to active-backup today. All I need to find out now is how to get it configured that it uses the second link only when the first link isn't available. In other words: when the main link goes down it should start using the backup link. But when the main link becomes available again it should use that again and not sticking to the backupline like it does now. If I find how to do this, I will edit the tutorial so other people can also see it :)
