adapter teaming

[Kevin Buettner]

On Oct 11,  9:56pm, Mike Starke wrote:

> Can anyone give me the skinny on how to team
> up 2 nics in Linux? 

>From Configure.help in 2.4.0-test9:

    Bonding driver support
    CONFIG_BONDING
      Say 'Y' or 'M' if you wish to be able to 'bond' multiple Ethernet
      Channels together. This is called 'Etherchannel' by Cisco,
      'Trunking' by Sun, and 'Bonding' in Linux.

      If you have two ethernet connections to some other computer, you can
      make them behave like one double speed connection using this driver.
      Naturally, this has to be supported at the other end as well, either
      with a similar Bonding Linux driver, a Cisco 5500 switch or a
      SunTrunking SunSoft driver.

      This is similar to the EQL driver, but it merges Ethernet segments
      instead of serial lines.

      If you want to compile this as a module ( = code which can be
      inserted in and removed from the running kernel whenever you want),
      say M here and read Documentation/modules.txt. The module will be
      called bonding.o.

>From drivers/net/bonding.c in the same sources:

 * This is useful to talk to a Cisco 5500, running Etherchannel, aka:
 *	Linux Channel Bonding
 *	Sun Trunking (Solaris)
 *
 * How it works:
 *    ifconfig bond0 ipaddress netmask up
 *      will setup a network device, with an ip address.  No mac address 
 *	will be assigned at this time.  The hw mac address will come from 
 *	the first slave bonded to the channel.  All slaves will then use 
 *	this hw mac address.
 *
 *    ifconfig bond0 down
 *         will release all slaves, marking them as down.
 *
 *    ifenslave bond0 eth0
 *	will attache eth0 to bond0 as a slave.  eth0 hw mac address will either
 *	a: be used as initial mac address
 *	b: if a hw mac address already is there, eth0's hw mac address 
 *	   will then  be set from bond0.


I haven't tried it, but I am running 2.4.0-test9 on one of my machines
without problems.

Kevin