[Beowulf] channel bonding

[Eduardo N. Asada]

Hi everybody,

I tried to configure ethernet channel bonding with two eepro100 NICs in a 
cluster with 8 nodes. First, I tried bonding only two machines by creating 
the ifcfg-bond0 and the slaves ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1, and making the 
appropriate changes in the modprobe.conf. 

However, the communication between them became too slow and some services such 
as NIS and NFS became unavailable. Are there more things to care of ?

in modprobe.conf
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=balance-alb miimon=100

The output of ifconfig  is as follows:

bond0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:D0:B7:27:99:6E
          inet addr:10.0.0.1  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::200:ff:fe00:0/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:60436 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:490366 errors:198 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:198
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:4252626 (4.0 MiB)  TX bytes:28888620 (27.5 MiB)

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:D0:B7:27:99:6E
          inet addr:10.0.0.1  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::2d0:b7ff:fe27:996e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:29917 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:246908 errors:102 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:102
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:2240157 (2.1 MiB)  TX bytes:14682945 (14.0 MiB)

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:D0:B7:2C:07:3C
          inet addr:10.0.0.1  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::2d0:b7ff:fe27:996e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:30519 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:243458 errors:96 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:96
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:2012469 (1.9 MiB)  TX bytes:14205675 (13.5 MiB)



-- 
Eduardo N. Asada
http://www.dsee.fee.unicamp.br/~asada
email: asada at dsee.fee.unicamp.br
         easada at ieee.org