nic bonding Fedora 8

[Chris Snook]

Mark Haney wrote:
> Steve Repo wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 6:38 PM, Mark Haney <mhaney at ercbroadband.org> 
>> wrote:
>>> Frank Murphy wrote:
>>>> Is this included in fedora 8.
>>>> http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Bonding
>>>>
>>>> Tried yum info */ifenslave
>>>>
>>>> Frank
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Yeah it's included, I use it all the time between GigE ports on my data
>>> servers.
>>>
>>
>> very cool! I'm planning to do something like this but have a questions.
>>
>> Does bonding really use both interfaces for data transfer or use the
>> second interface only if the first one is maxed out?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Steve
>>
> 
> AFAIK, it's pretty well load balanced in that it looks and acts like one 
> interface.  I believe the algorithm determines which interface is least 
> used and sends it from there.

It depends entirely on the bonding mode.  To summarize:

mode 0: naive round-robin, hammers the CPU, but the only mode that can exceed 
wire speed for a single socket.  Doesn't scale past two NICs.

mode 1: Only one NIC active at a time.  If High Availability is your priority, 
use this, because it's least likely to cause problems, since it looks to the 
network like just one NIC, because it is.

mode 2: non-LACP trunking, for people with certain older managed switches

mode 3: mirrors all traffic on all interfaces, generally only used to test 
networking gear

mode 4: LACP trunking, load-balances across active NICs with help from a managed 
switch

mode 5: transmit load balancing, good for servers that receive small requests 
and then send large responses

mode 6: active load balancing, uses arp trickery to make peers communicate with 
different NICs, only good if most of your traffic is within the subnet

-- Chris