Shotgunning network cards

Belisarius · 03-03-2005, 07:08 AM

I have a file server with two network cards. I remember that people used to shotgun their modems to get higher throughput, and was wondering if something similar could be done with network cards? I'd like to get them to share an IP, and load balance network traffic to/from. Can someone point me in the right direction?

redhead · 03-03-2005, 08:31 AM

Something like this: Advanced routing

Belisarius · 04-20-2005, 11:49 AM

I recently got around to working on this, but the problem seems to be that while I can do half of what they're talking about (I can deal with it on the server side), the Linksys router it's plugged into doesn't have access to the various ports, at least in a manner I can understand.

redhead · 04-21-2005, 12:22 AM

Have you looked at channel bonding?

Belisarius · 04-21-2005, 04:00 AM

Nope, I haven't. I'll start looking up information on that term. Thanks.

teknomage1 · 04-21-2005, 04:32 AM

you can also build a smarter router.

Belisarius · 04-21-2005, 05:10 AM

Not really; I don't have the parts for it.

Belisarius · 04-21-2005, 06:40 AM

I followed the Ethernet Bonding HOWTO I found, but I ended up with errors when I tried to restart the network. As it turns out, functionality required for the bonding module isn't present in the drivers for my 3com cards.

The HOWTO is old (2000), so I'm looking around for any information that might lead me to a way to get this to work with the newer 2.6 kernel and modules . . .

*Edit: Fixed the HOWTO link

teknomage1 · 04-21-2005, 09:14 AM

I couldn't follow the link you posted but I found a local copy in my kernel tree. I think the main difference is that nowadays bonding is accomplished via the "ip" command. It's suposed to replace ifconfig and route one day. For now here's a link to their descriptions http://linux-ip.net/html/ I think section 2.3 discusses bonding with ip.

Belisarius · 04-21-2005, 09:47 AM

Cool, thanks. I'll take a look.

Belisarius · 04-21-2005, 09:57 AM

That link, in and of itself wasn't able to help me, as I'm working within the constraints of the Sveasoft firmware upgrades to the WRT54G router, which is a bit odd and different. However, it did give me more keywords to use when searching the Sveasoft forums, and behold what I found. Now to see if I can make practical use of it.

Belisarius · 04-21-2005, 10:12 AM

Ok, now that bonding on the router seems to be turned on, I can focus on getting it to work on the server. Hopfully "ip" will be able to succeed where 2.4 bonding didn't!

Belisarius · 04-21-2005, 10:46 AM

Ok, another update. Using the documentation teknomage1 pointed me towards, I got it to work (at least by all apperances it works). I haven't actually tested it to see if it works in a practical manner yet; I need to get a couple machines to pull/push ISOs onto it and see what happens. The bonding support on the Linksys/Sveasoft router is black magic, so I'm not sure of any real benefits yet.

So far the only thing that seems amiss is the fact that Redhat complains when I shutdown that the ethernet card has a different MAC than expected, but altering a configuration file ought to fix that.

teknomage1 · 04-21-2005, 11:11 AM

Neat, hope everything works out.