Derek Neely

Its often necessary to add bonding (NIC teaming – in windows world) to a linux config. This gives you 2 things: higher throughput on the interfaces and redundancy (if a card or switch happens to die). I made this post just as a quick reference for how to do such on a Gentoo system.

This article assumes that you have the proper kernel configuration to support bonded interfaces.

Device Driver => Network device support => <M> Bonding driver support

Load the necessary modules for bonding and install the necessary packages.

linux# modprobe bonding
linux# echo “bonding” >> /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
linux# emerge net-misc/ifenslave

Configure the interfaces: vi /etc/conf.d/net

config_eth0=( “null” )
config_eth1=( “null” )
slaves_bond0=”eth0 eth1″
config_bond0=( “10.10.10.69/24″ )
routes_bond0=( “default gw 10.10.10.1″ )

Start the interface and setup to start on boot.

linux# ln -s /etc/init.d/net.lo /etc/init.d/net.bond0
linux# rc-update add net.bond0 default
linux# /etc/init.d/net.bond0 start

If you have eth0 and/or eth1 setup to start on boot already you will need to delete those init scripts.
linux# rc-update del net.eth0; rc-update del net.eth1

Test