Channel Bonding enables two or more network interfaces to act as one, simultaneously increasing the bandwidth and providing redundancy. This is a great way of achieving redundancy to a server. If one physical NIC is down or unplugged, it will automatically move resource to other NIC card. Channel bonding will work with the help of bonding driver in kernel. This post guides you through how to create NIC / Channel Bonding in RedHat, CentOS and Fedora Linux.
Step 1: Creating Bonding Channel
As a root, create a new file name bonding.conf in the /etc/modprobe.d/ directory. Name can be anything you like as long as it ends with a .conf extension. Insert the following line in this new file.
alias bond0 bonding
For each configured channel bonding interface, there must be a corresponding entry in your new /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf file.
Step 2: Creating Channle Bonding Interface
To create a channel bonding interface, create a file in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory called ifcfg-bond0. The following is a sample channel bonding configuration file. (Note : IP Address may differ in your environment.)
# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0
DEVICE=bond0 IPADDR=192.168.1.8 NETMASK=255.255.255.0 ONBOOT=yes BOOTPROTO=none USERCTL=no
Step 3: Configuring Channel Bonding Interface
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. Edit physical interface card details as under.
For eth0
# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0 USERCTL=no ONBOOT=yes MASTER=bond0 SLAVE=yes BOOTPROTO=none
For eth1
# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
DEVICE=eth1 USERCTL=no ONBOOT=yes MASTER=bond0 SLAVE=yes BOOTPROTO=none
The above directives are self explanatory for many system admin, however, let me explain to newbie.
- DEVICE: Indicates what is the device name
- USERCTL: Indicates that can user control this device(here its 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 its bond0)
- SLAVE: Is this device acting as slave?
- BOOTPROTO: What about getting IP Address from DHCP? It’s set to none which indicate it’s a static IP)
Step 4: Restarting Network Service
Restart the network service and see the output of ifconfig.
# service network restart
[[email protected] network-scripts]# ifconfig bond0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:21:60:30:C4 inet addr:192.168.1.8 Bcast:172.16.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fe69:31c4/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:19676 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:342 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:1623240 (1.5 MiB) TX bytes:42250 (41.2 KiB) eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:21:60:30:C4 UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:10057 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:171 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:832257 (812.7 KiB) TX bytes:22751 (22.2 KiB) Interrupt:19 Base address:0x2000 eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:21:60:30:C4 UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:9620 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:173 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:791043 (772.5 KiB) TX bytes:20207 (19.7 KiB) Interrupt:19 Base address:0x2080 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:104 (104.0 b) TX bytes:104 (104.0 b)
Hi,
To create bonding, Follow below steps.
1. create a file ifcfg-bondX and add below lines.
DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=192.168.0.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=yes
HOTPLUG=no
BOOTPROTO=none
USERCTL=no
BONDING_OPTS=”bonding parameters separated by spaces” # Such as BONDING_OPTS=”miimon=100 mode=1″
NM_CONTROLLED=no
2. After creating bonding interface, its time to configure slave interface.
3. Edit interface files and add below lines.
DEVICE=ethX
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
HOTPLUG=no
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
USERCTL=no
NM_CONTROLLED=no
4. Restart the network service to load the newly added configuration.
#service network restart
This is explained a bit further at below link.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt
We trying to configure em2 and em3 two bonds in Redhat 6.7 but not success ,
Bond0 and bond1 configured W/O any issue but due to some oracle dB limitation we em2 and em3 two bonds
Please suggest
Hi Joginder,
Bonding needs at least 2 nic. You can refer to below article.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt
i have configured. but eth0 and eth1 are same mac address. could you please help me on this issue.
@Muthu,
Open each file and modify the MAC address, that’s it and don’t forget to restart the network service.
why is it i followed the steps but when i type ifconfig i dont have an ip?
@Medina,
May I know any error you getting while running ifconfig? also let me know on which Linux distributions you’re trying?
the problem is i cant ping the gateway of the nic bonding. i can ping the ip address but the gateway i cant.
i’m using it on redhat linux 6.6. the only problem is i cant ping the gateway. i cannot access the bonding using putty. i always access it remotely
Hello and thanks for this page. Only a quick question. Please can you tell me if another IP address is needed in addition to the existing IP from the network interfaces?. In other words, if I have got eth0 and eth1 with its respectives IP, is another IP required for bonding?
Thanks a lot.
Nice post, thank you.
Small typo in eth1 editing , kindly change
For eth1
# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
@Radha,
Thanks for informing us about that typo..We’ve fixed in the writeup….
Hi Expert,
My network bonding works perfectly after do this setting but I’ve an other issue after i done all this configuration given here my “network connection icon got red “x””.
It’s this normal after do the bonding?
I’m using Rhel 6.5
Please advise.
Thank you.