Many new servers come with multiple Network Interface Cards (NIC). Linux gives you the ability to "bond" those ports together to create a single usable interface. This gives you the advantage of fault tolerance and load balancing the NICs together. There are many different bonding types, but I will focus on the newer of them call balance-alb (Adaptive Load Balancing). It is great because it requires no special switch configuration and load balances both outgoing and incoming packets by influencing the switches by altering outbound ARP packets.
This procedure is using
Ubuntu Server 7.10 (Gutsy). I was interested in making two separate bonds out of four interfaces, one for the corporate network and the other to connect the server to a SAN. The configuration for other types of Linux are similar in concept but usually have different configuration files.
Continue reading "Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server"
