NIC Bonding in rhel5

 Bonding in rhel5
Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows administrators to bind multiple network interfaces together into a single channel using the bonding kernel module and a special network interface called a channel bonding interface. Channel bonding enables two or more network interfaces to act as one, simultaneously increasing the bandwidth and providing redundancy.




The following is a sample channel bonding configuration file:
#vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0
DEVICE=bond0
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=10.0.1.27
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=10.0.1.0
USERCTL=no

After the channel bonding interface is created, the network interfaces to be bound together must be configured by adding the MASTER= and SLAVE= directives to their configuration files. The configuration files for each of the channel-bonded interfaces can be nearly identical.

 For example, if two Ethernet interfaces are being channel bonded, both eth0 and eth1 may look like the following example:

#vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX
DEVICE=ethX
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no


In this example replace X with the Numerical Value of the interface

Far Channel Bounding interface to be valid, The Kernel Module Must be Loaded. To ensure that the module is Loaded when the Channel bounding interface is brought up.


#vim /etc/modprob.conf
The following Lines in
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=balance-alb miimon=100

Then
#modprobe bonding

# service network restart

# ifconfig